


Artifact

by peldarjoi



Series: Terrorists Don't Get to Be Heroes [8]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Bajorans, Canon-Typical Violence, Cardassians, F/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Occupation of Bajor, Original Character(s), Starfleet, Starfleet Intelligence, Voyager reference, caretaker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:07:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 34,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24794380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peldarjoi/pseuds/peldarjoi
Summary: A secret buried deep in the forests of Bajor, an unsolved and forgotten mystery from the time of The Occupation, becomes a very real and present threat amidst a time of civil unrest on Bajor.
Series: Terrorists Don't Get to Be Heroes [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/553798





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of a long (long-winded?) saga. If you don't want to read the whole 350,000 words up to this point, here's a brief overview of the characters.
> 
> Kee – Norvish Keedra. Bajoran, former member of the Bajoran Resistance during the Cardassian Occupation. Joined Starfleet in 2372, security division. Recruited into Starfleet Intelligence in 2376, partnered with Jeff Riggs. Married Loren Dales 2379 and had a baby girl, Iliah, later that year.
> 
> Jeff – Jeff Riggs, primary alias, real name unknown. Human, Starfleet Intelligence agent. Went undercover to Bajor during the Cardassian Occupation in 2367 where he first met Kee. Recruited Kee into Starfleet Intelligence in 2376. The two had a casual sexual relationship but ended it because it was beginning to interfere with their professional partnership.
> 
> Ren – Ren Larno. Bajoran, leader of Bajoran Resistance cell where he trained Kee personally, intending her to eventually be his replacement as leader of the cell. Joined Bajoran Militia after the Withdrawal, later absorbed into Starfleet with a provisional captain’s rank.
> 
> Joial – Norvish Joial. Bajoran, Kee’s uncle, former member of the Bajoran Resistance, primarily a computer tech.
> 
> Cadda – Family name unknown. Bajoran, joined the Bajoran Resistance as a teen and was kicked out of her family’s home when they found out, dropped her family name. Sole survivor from her resistance cell during the Joralla Massacres, captured, tortured and raped. Escaped and joined Ren’s resistance cell.
> 
> Edda – Kee’s brother. Disapproved of the Resistance and his sister’s part in it. In 2384 leads a project to clean local water sources poisoned by the Cardassians during the occupation.
> 
> Loren – Kee’s husband, helmsman on the Endeavor.

_2384, Bardeezan system, Starfleet Intelligence operation._

Cavein shoved Kee roughly against the wall, knocking a puff of air out of her lungs. She giggled playfully and wrapped her hands around his jaw to pull him in for another kiss. 

With his hands under her arms, pressed against the sides of her breasts, he lifted her up onto her tiptoes and slipped his leg between hers. 

She bit his lip gently as she pulled away from the kiss, drawing a throaty chuckle from him. If he suspected anything, he was exceptionally good at hiding it. But he didn't and he wasn't. 

His hands slid hungerly down her sides past the hem of her short skirt and grasped the backs of her thighs. With a quick movement he lifted her off her feet while spreading her legs to use his body to pin her against the wall. 

"Director!" She yelped playfully, following it with another flirtatious giggle. 

The Director of Proceedings at the Boslic embassy, also known to SI as the middle man between a Boslic-Bardeezan smuggling operation, was so entranced by what he expected to be a midnight tryst with an eager Federation intern that he missed her sliding a miniature hypospray out of a hidden pocket in the hem of her dress. 

She slid her hands up his chest, wrapping them around his neck to conceal her intended movement. The hard surface of the device brushed against his neck and he started to turn to see what was in her hand when she pulled his face toward hers for a deeply distracting kiss. Before the sour taste from the alcohol he'd been drinking could make her gag, she pressed the hypospray against his neck. He registered only a moment of surprise before he collapsed limply to the floor. 

"Energize." She said to Jeff over the open comm. 

The hastily rented hotel room dissolved around her and she and Director Cavein's unconscious form materialized in the cockpit of Jeff's new gyges-class shuttle. It was considerably more comfortable than his old prototype model, which had had no interior walls, only two chairs, a table and one cot for them to take turns sleeping. This one, though was fully outfitted similar to a delta-class shuttle and much like other gyges-classes she'd been in. 

Kee stretched a kink of out her neck as Jeff piloted the shuttle out of the system. A whiff of the target's cologne on her bare shoulder turned her stomach. It had been a gruelingly long effort to seduce him. Over the course of four hours at the bar, she'd consumed far more alcohol than her stomach could handle and based on the lightness in her head, the inhibitor she'd taken beforehand was beginning to wear off. 

"That took a while." He called back to her. 

"I hadn't noticed." She grumbled while passing a tricorder over the drugged man's body. 

"When you have him secured, you should go grab a shower and unwind a bit." 

It wasn't a bad idea, he knew how much she hated alcohol, and the mission was pretty much over at this point, all they had left to do was deliver him. The tricorder beeped at her, indicating a tracking device. She dug through his clothes to find the tiny item and deactivated it. 

"We'll cross Endeavor's path in a couple of hours, I can drop you off with them and take this guy to Starbase 310 myself." He offered. 

"Why is Endeavor over here?" Last she knew, her home ship was two sectors away. 

"According to the logs, they're heading to Deep Space Nine for a personnel transfer." 

Deep Space Nine... she searched for an excuse to delay her reunion with her ship. "That's okay, I'll go with you." She said, knowing he'd see right through it. 

He did, and looked over his shoulder at her with a suspicious lift to his eyebrow. 

She gave in and sighed, she couldn't hide anything from him. "If I'm on Endeavor when they're in the Bajoran system, the doctor will make me take time off, maybe even go home for a few days." 

"That's not a bad idea." 

"Yes, it is. I hate not working." She busied herself putting away their equipment. It really was as trivial as that. She'd spent her whole life in pursuit of... well... pursuing the enemy, whatever form it took at the time. When she wasn't engaged in that, she honestly didn't know what to do with herself. It was one thing when she used to go home and keep busy working on the family house, but now that it belonged to her brother and his betrothed, there wasn't much there for her. 

"It's really not, you work constantly. When you're not with me, I know how often you pull double shifts." 

"Have you been spying on me?" She narrowed her eyes at him. It wouldn't take much effort for him to look up her duty logs. 

"Loren told me." He shrugged with a smirk that told her he knew exactly how much she appreciated the two of them talking about her behind her back. "You need to take a break once in a while. You're so..." 

She whirled on him. "What?" 

"Wound up." He said, seemingly oblivious to the spike in her temper, but she knew he was doing it on purpose. "How long has it been since you had sex?" 

"What?" She entirely stopped what she was doing and planted her hands on her hips. 

"When was the last time you and Loren had sex?" 

He was messing with her but knowing it didn't stop the rise in her voice. "I don't know. I've been on mission with you for two weeks." 

"And how long before that?" 

Their prisoner began to stir, so she grabbed the hypospray. "I-" She began, unsure how to answer. It hadn't been all that long, but not really as often as she would like either. Life just got in the way sometimes. "We're both senior officers, we're on-call twenty-four hours a day, we have a child... we don't exactly have a lot of time-" She punctuated her line of excuses by dosing Cavein again. 

"That's what I thought. You need sex." 

"Excuse me?" She straightened to face him again. 

"Trust me, I know you. And I'd be glad to help you out with that if you weren't married." 

"For old times' sake?" She said with a smirk, finally managing to reign in her temper. 

"It worked, didn't it?" He said playfully. 

She held up the hypospray to him, "What makes you think I haven't been drugging you and having my way with you all along?" 

He only shook his head and turned back to his console, but she could tell by the shudder in his shoulders that he was laughing. "I don't even know what to say." 

"That's a first." She chuckled as she cuffed the prisoner's wrists and ankles. 


	2. Chapter 2

_19 years earlier, 2365, Cardassian Occupation. Forests of the Joralla mountain range, Bajor._

The procession of Cardassian vehicles moved slowly and noisily through the forest with foot soldiers scattered among them. Two small groups of Bajoran rebels watched from the cover of the underbrush on either side. They'd discovered this well-worn path a few days earlier and had been following it to find out what the Cardassians were up to when they had heard the vehicles in the distance. 

With the exception of trying to track down the Resistance cells that called the forest home, the Cardassians had never ventured out this far, but based on the amount of equipment on the convoy, something big was going on somewhere out here. 

Kee waited for the last vehicle to pass, followed by another group of soldiers on foot, peering uselessly into the thick forest. There was no way they'd be able to spot them, and the dampening field that covered much of the forest rendered their sensors useless. She shifted her crouched position to rest her knee on the ground, immediately feeling wet mud soak through the fabric. 

Cardassians. Hatred seethed through her veins. They took whatever they wanted, moved in where they weren't welcome and used anything and anyone they wished. Her fingers gripped the weapon at her side, ready to retaliate on this latest invasion. 

The moment she managed to catch Ren's eye across the way, she signaled him with the one-handed sign language the resistance used: _Attack?_

_No._ He signed back. 

_Attack._ She signed again more forcefully. The Cardassians were traipsing through their forest, completely unaware that they were being tracked. Now would be their chance to attack. 

But he signaled again: _No. Too many._

_Attack!_ She signed one more time emphatically holding the image in her mind of blasting the convoy into smoldering ruins. 

_No! Follow._ Was his reply and by the look on his face, she knew the argument was over. 

She pressed her lips into a thin line and huffed a silent sigh, finally signaling her group to follow. They began picking their way parallel to the tail end of the convoy. Her group, which consisted of only Cadda and Gam, were so silent behind her that she would have had to turn to see that they were with her, but she didn't need to, they would stay with her no matter what. 

The phaser rifle would have been more comfortable hanging from her shoulder, but she continued to grip it as though ready to attack. They had no idea what to expect at the end of this makeshift road. If they allowed this equipment to reach its destination, it could end up beyond their reach. This was a mistake, they should attack now to prevent it from arriving. But she obeyed his orders anyway. 

* * * 

Ren could neither see nor hear Kee and her group, but he felt confident they were right there with them. She was a good soldier, one of the best he'd ever known, he thought with a twinge of pride. She'd argue, doggedly stubborn, if she disagreed with his orders, but in the end, she'd obey. 

In fact, if not for the necessity of total silence in this case, he was certain she'd have stood her ground on the issue much longer. Thank the Prophets for small favors. 

With Joial, Ilwea and Naren in close proximity, he refocused his attention on the convoy, wondering what could possess the Cardassians to haul all of this stuff way out here in the forest. There was no way to tell from the vehicles what sort of facility they were heading towards. 

Kee did have a point, to attack them right there and then would prevent them from reaching that destination. Since the massacres the previous year, his cell still only had seven people. The rebels were out numbered at least three-to-one, maybe more if any of the vehicles were troop transports, but they did have the element of surprise. _Maybe_ they could take them on. However, the convoy was less of a concern to him than the destination. If they attacked now, the facility, whatever it was, would be on the alert by the time they found it. 

Night had fallen by the time they began to see artificial light up ahead and Ren's back and legs had begun to ache from bending to keep his head below the underbrush. He slowed to allow the convoy to leave them behind and crept closer to the edge where he could signal Kee with a quick blink of his flashlight. 

Soon, she appeared across the road from him, just barely visible through the leaves, right where he expected her to be. When the Cardassians were far enough away, he beckoned her over and three hunched forms dashed silently across to join them. Finally back together, he wordlessly led his small group away from the road up a ridge where they'd be able to see the source of the light from a better vantage point. 

Spread out below them where there had once been thick forest, stretched a small deforested area dotted with temporary structures on one side and at the far end, machinery that was systematically removing trees to expand the cleared space. 

The air prickled with fury radiating from every one of his people as they watched the devastation. Trees that had stood for hundreds of years, gone in a few seconds. For the Cardassians to destroy _their_ forest for their own use was infuriating. But they shouldn't have been surprised, they took everything and everyone on Bajor for their own use, Joralla wasn't any exception. 

Gam, the newest member of their group spoke up in a hushed tone, "Is it just me or do those perimeter force field emitters look a lot like the kind they use around labor camps?" 

Ren's eyes followed the field generators that had been installed around the beginning of the boundary and confirmed that they were the same. 

"Why would they set up a labor camp all the way out here?" Cadda asked. 

Early on in the Occupation, the entire planet had been surveyed for favorable mining opportunities and the Hill Provinces had been given a very low productivity score. Rumor had it some of the mines in Lonar and Kendra were having trouble meeting quota. Maybe they were getting desperate enough to go after areas that had previously been considered worthless. 

"There must be a vein of uridium through here." Joial offered. And they would clear the forest and bring in disposable slave labor to get to it. 

"We have to shut it down before they get any further." Kee said. 

"We will, but not by ourselves." Ren agreed, formulating a quick plan. "Joial, see if you can get ahold of Prortu, we'll need her help. Ilwea and Naren, you'll come with me, there's an old weapons cache near here. If it's still there, it'll have what we need. Kee, you take Cadda and Gam to scout out the place. I want to know how many soldiers there are, whether there are Bajorans in there. Are the camp's defenses installed and functioning yet? Vulnerabilities, entry points, everything." 

"Got it." Kee gave him just the hint of a nod, already moving to begin her task and the rest of them did likewise. 


	3. Chapter 3

Fatigue tugged at the back of Kee's eyes from a day of hiking that followed the previous night with very little sleep. With so few people in their cell, there weren't enough of them to keep watch at night and also get enough sleep. She took a deep breath to ward off the yawn that tightened her throat. A little bit of sleep would be nice, but personal comforts were by far not anything she expected for herself. 

She forced her mind to focus, they couldn't afford any mistakes. If the Cardassians had any warning they were there, the alarm would go up and the place would be impenetrable. At least to a couple of small cells like Ren's and Prortu's. 

It would have been a bad idea to attack the convoy en route. Ren was... not wrong. She was willing to admit that much. At least to herself, anyway. He would never pry such an admission from her she thought with a smirk. 

The grouping of temporary buildings lay just down the hill from her position. She'd sent Cadda and Gam to scout out the perimeter to get an idea of the size of the boundary shield and whether it was functional yet. Herself, she'd knelt down behind a protruding tree root to watch what little activity was going on down there. 

Other than the Cardassians unloading the equipment that just arrived and a few guards walking among the structures, everyone else seemed to be inside. Not surprising. It was a little cool that night and the drizzle from earlier in the day had left a dampness in the air that drew the heat right out of one's body. 

Some movement back in the unloading area caught her attention. Half a dozen Bajorans were being ushered roughly out of one of the cargo containers. The first of many, certainly. Her heart sank, if there were laborers there, she was sure they couldn't guarantee their safety during the attack. 

She shifted her weight to the balls of her feet, making a grinding noise in the pebbles and dirt that was too faint for the Cardassians to hear at this distance. Beginning to creep down the steep hillside, she placed her feet carefully. Slipping and tumbling down the hill or sending down even the tiniest landslide could tip off the enemy to her presence, but she had to get a closer look. 

She stopped just before the edge of the trees and strained to see inside the temporary buildings. The first one was empty of Cardassians but, judging by the rows of consoles, she guessed that it was the control center. As she sidestepped to see into another one, something lightly brushed against her arm followed by a stinging sensation like razorblades dragging along her skin. 

A painful yelp caught in her throat and she fought to keep her reaction silent as she searched for the cause. A _turi_ nettle stock swayed back and forth where she had brushed against it. She silently cursed herself for such a stupid mistake. The pain only increased as the microscopic stinging barbs the plant had left behind continued to inject histamine into her skin. 

She could only bite her lip and blink away the tears through the pain. Ilwea would have something to treat the sting, but it would be hours until they were back together. She would have to push through and do her job or this would be the least of her worries. 

Moving more carefully this time, she peered into the next building where there were rows of cots with Cardassians sleeping on most of them. Her lip curled into a sneer at the sight, she wanted nothing more than to lob a few grenades in there. She had some, too, in her pack, but this place would require more than a few hand-made explosives, no matter how satisfying it would be to take them out in their sleep. 

Now that she was closer, she caught a better look at the Bajoran workers. They were frail, elderly, impossibly thin. Throw-away workers by the Cardassian rationale. They'd probably been taken from some other labor camp where they'd been deemed too weak to be useful. Their safety would be the Cardassians' lowest possible priority. She and the others would have to be very careful during their attack that these people wouldn't be used as fodder. 

As she watched, the workers were made to unload the remaining supplies from the convoy, struggling under the weight of the equipment. _Pathetic._ She thought to herself, that able-bodied soldiers would stand around forcing elderly people in need of medical care to haul their cargo was nothing less than despicable. No, her original assessment was correct: pathetic. 

As though their job wasn't miserable enough, the drizzle was beginning to start up again, which only served to sour the guards' moods even more, causing them to jab and prod their slaves with greater impatience. Her heart pounding furiously in her ears nearly drowned out the burning pain on her arm. 

She was so agitated by the scene before her that she nearly missed two Cardassians slip away into the woods past the clearcutting machines. She considered following them but decided against it. A pair of Cardassians in the cold, rainy forest wouldn't get far. They were probably just techs scouting out their mining site anyway. She turned back to her recon task. 

* * * 

Pran gathered his geological analysis equipment into a satchel and bundled himself up against the cold outside while Drik waited impatiently patient at the door. Drik _looked_ patient with his relaxed shoulders and pleasant smile, but Pran knew better. He'd worked under him long enough to recognize the subtle changes in his otherwise invariably placid demeanor. And most terrifying was that the pleasant smile remained in place whether he was receiving a favorable report or cutting someone's throat. Both of which Pran had witnessed. 

"I'm ready." Pran mumbled. 

With the rest of the construction crew and their security detail either asleep or occupied with the small group of laborers that just arrived, this would be their best opportunity to slip away to conduct a survey of the site without the glinn looking over his shoulder. 

Pran gripped the neck of his coat tight around him as Drik opened the door and stepped out to realize that it was raining _again_. 

_Damn place._ He grumbled to himself with his Obsidian Order handler right on his heels. It was just his luck that the artifact had been tracked to a planet that was so completely contrary to Cardassian physiology. He'd rather have located it on an enemy-controlled world than this cold, wet place where everything seemed to have something growing on it. He felt as though if he stood still long enough he, too, would sprout moss like these trees that surrounded him. 

As soon as he made it past the machinery that was eliminating these loathsome trees, they were in the clear and headed straight towards the anomalous reading he'd picked up earlier. 


	4. Chapter 4

"The perimeter fence is complete and active with a two-meter margin cleared on either side." Kee said, drawing a rough shape in the dirt while Ilwea worked to relieve the nettle sting on her arm. The rain that had been coming down all night was light enough that it had only soaked through the first centimeter of the forest floor, leaving them a dry canvas for her sketch. "The forcefield struts are not yet complete, so the fence is their only protection at the moment." 

"How many patrols?" Ren asked. 

"Three. Two with the laborers and one mobile." 

A rustle of branches was the only indication that Prortu had arrived with her cell, out of breath as though they had hurried here. With just a brief greeting, Ren and the others turned their attention back to Kee's report. "There are five temporary buildings." She drew an arrangement of rectangles. 

In her brief glance at the newcomers, she'd seen only a quick silhouette of Traie, but it was enough to know he was there. "Officer barracks," She identified the buildings one by one, "command center, laborer barracks and this looks like some kind of research lab for testing samples. This is storage of some kind. They have their building materials stacked here," She indicated with a series of parallel lines, "and the machines that are clearing away the trees are about here." She drew an arc and sat back on her knees. 

"With the perimeter fence already active, we'll have a hard time getting in." Ren muttered, but Prortu spoke up immediately. 

"We might have a way. We've done it before." She said, squatting down next to Kee. "If this is temporary fencing to be removed once the forcefield is activated, the framing is probably set up on footers not permanently fixed in the ground." 

"That's right, it is." Cadda offered. 

"We should be able to lift two of those footers up enough for some of us to slip under the fence." She illustrated her words with her hands as she tended to do. 

"Those things have got to weigh fifty kilos each." Ren said. "Plus the weight of the fence." 

"I didn't say it was easy, I said it was possible." She goaded him good-naturedly. 

"And you think it can be done without setting off the displacement alarm?" Joial asked. 

She nodded, "It can't be lifted very high, so only the smallest of us could get through. But this is your mission, Ren, it's your call." 

Ren's eyes landed briefly on each member of the group to see if anybody else had another suggestion, but they didn't. "Alright, we'll send Prortu, Kee, Cadda, Aarka and..." He paused, looking at the one unfamiliar face. He must have been a new recruit to Prortu's cell since they'd last seen each other. 

"Shilri." The boy said in a prepubescent voice. He couldn't have been more than thirteen years old. 

"Shilri, then. Naren?" 

While Naren leaned in to study Kee's diagram, Traie caught her eye from the back of the group and made a lewd gesture at her. She had to bite her lip to stifle the giggle that bubbled up in her chest and barely managed to return a stern look for goofing around during a mission briefing. 

The corner of his lip curled up at her response, sending a thrill through her chest. His lips led her gaze to the angle of his jaw, which led to his broad, strong shoulders and down his toned arms that were smudged with dirt. Before she realized it, her eyes had fallen to his hand and fingers that rested on his phaser. Hands that could fight and wield a deadly weapon yet hold her so gently. 

Her attention snapped back to the present and she turned back to Naren, but not before she caught another smirk from Traie. 

"We have three argine/sorium explosives and a couple-dozen of my cytromyaline charges. I'd like to plant the argine/soriums here, here and here." Naren jabbed his finger into the dirt at three locations: the officer barracks, command center and lab. "Then place some of the cytromyaline among the building supplies. Wherever you can to cause the most damage." 

He pulled an argine/sorium device out of a satchel next to him and held it up to the five that would be going in. "The argine and sorium are very temperamental, so I've left the firing key out of the mechanism. Once you have the device secured, you'll need to open it up," he demonstrated by turning the casing one quarter turn to open it, "and slide the firing key into place." He mimed the movement, then closed it back up with the care he always displayed when handling explosives and set it down in front of him. "They're already synced up with my ignition control, so all you need to do it set them and get out of the blast range, which will be about here." He added a rough circle in the dirt. 

"The barracks and control center are close to each other." Prortu pointed out. "Kee and I can take care of those. Cadda and Shilri, you'll take the third. And Aarka, you take the cytromyaline charges and place them at your discretion. Everyone, be ready to grab the laborers at the last moment and get them out of the kill zone before we detonate." 

Ren looked up at Cadda from studying Kee's sketch. "You said that the cutting machines are unmanned, correct?" 

"Right." 

"So we can send the five of you in somewhere back here." He indicated a location. "The rest of us will take up positions outside the perimeter and move in to clean up after the blast." He said. "Everybody check your supplies, we'll go in five." 

Kee stepped away to where she'd left her pack and opened it up to inspect its contents when she felt more than heard someone move behind her. Fortunately for him, she'd identified who it was before he slipped his hands around her waist. 

"You always know exactly what's in there, there's no need to check." Traie said, nuzzling her ear and sending goosebumps down her neck. 

She set her pack down and turned within the circle of his arms to face him. "I'd rather not die one of these days just because I thought I had something I didn't." 

Instead of replying, he leaned down to press his lips against hers. 

In contrast to the cool air, his lips were warm and impossibly soft. She pressed her body against his to take in more of his warmth and savored the taste of his mouth. 

She drew strength and courage from him as though it radiated from his body like heat. Only when they were together like this did it seem possible they could survive this. Maybe, just maybe, they could win. Maybe there was another life waiting for them someday. 

Footsteps approached from behind him and she could feel the force when the individual clapped him on the back. "Time's up sweethearts." That was Naren's voice. 

When every kiss could be their last one, it was almost physically painful to let go. Reluctantly, she tore herself away from him and turned to Naren who handed her one of the argine/sorium devices. 

"I already gave one to Prortu." He said. 

She set it carefully into her pack and fastened it closed. Traie's fingers intertwined with hers as they walked back to the others. There was nothing for them to say that the touch of their hands didn't communicate, so they just went silently until they reached the rest of the group and allowed their hands to drop free at their sides. 

The boy, Shilri sidled up to her as they began the hike to the entry point parallel to the fence. "Kee? Right?" 

"Yes." 

He held up one of the cytromyaline charges. "I haven't used one of these before. Actually, I haven't even _seen_ one before." 

"Don't worry, you'll get _very_ familiar with them." She said with a chuckle. "Here, I'll show you." He handed it over and she outlined the basics of how to affix them to an object, how to arm them and what _not_ to do. The same lecture she'd had when she joined and the same one she'd given Gam not long ago. 

Shilri listened attentively enough that she felt confident he was getting the information he needed. He seemed so young even though she'd been quite a bit younger when she joined up. That seemed like a lifetime ago. 

"The brilliance of Naren's design is that if you remove the command receiver," she demonstrated by detaching the component, "it works as a grenade. The activation key will give you ten seconds, then detonate." She replaced the receiver and handed it back to him. 

Before long they had reached the noisy equipment on the other side of the fence and walked a short distance beyond it. The lengths of fence were several meters between the posts, plenty of width for them to get through, the question was could they lift it high enough for them to slide under without tripping the alarm by touching the fence or moving it too much? She guessed they had a very narrow margin between too high and not high enough. 

Wordlessly, Ren separated them into two groups and pointed out a pair of posts. 

Prortu laid down in the dirt next to the fence and the two posts were lifted only about ten centimeters. 

Kee watched the indicator at the top of the post to change color, showing that the alarm had gone off, but it didn't. 

The moment Prortu was through, they carefully set it back down with a collective exhale. 

Kee was next. She got into position on the ground while the fence was again lifted just high enough. Scooting only fractions of a centimeter at a time, she had to turn her face to the side to avoid brushing against the fence. The tiny hairs on her face stood on end this close to the EM field generated by the sensors embedded into the fence. 

Using muscles that didn't tend to be employed for this purpose, at least, not since she'd had to squeeze through a narrow, ten-meter-long duct a few months ago, she slid her body through the small space. Not even a second after her shoulder had cleared, the whole thing came back down again. She stood next to Prortu to wait for the other three. 

* * * 

It wasn't that the fence posts and footers were terribly heavy, Traie could lift fifty kilos with only moderate effort, it was that they had to do it from an awkward angle, then hold it at a precise height for long enough for the team to get through. There were enough of them that they could take turns, two at a time on each side, but by the end of it, his muscles were beginning to shake by the time Shilri was through. 

Shilri was the most recent to join their cell and automatically looked up to him as some kind of surrogate brother. He didn't mind, Traie thought as they shadowed their comrades on the other side of the fence, it just seemed strange, he still felt like he was new to all of this, too. But even just two years was a long time in the Resistance, many recruits didn't survive past their first month. If you made it a full year, well, you were practically seasoned. 

His thoughts turned to Kee, who from here was just a dark silhouette, scurrying with the others toward their targets. He hated that they couldn't be together longer and could only hope they'd have time after this mission, but he doubted it. His cell had been in the middle of planning a time-sensitive raid on a supply shipment when they got the call that Ren needed them. They would have to go back immediately after they were done here. 

He ached to hold her in his arms long enough to make them both forget about all of this, even just for a few minutes. And a few minutes was usually all of the time they had together. Stolen moments during missions, slipping away from the group long enough for a small amount of intimacy while having to watch each other's back, always having to say goodbye knowing any moment could be the last. If they could just make it through this, they could have a beautiful life together. 

One by one, they settled into locations along the fence where they could see what was happening in the settlement. Traie knelt down in his position with a knife ready to slit the fence open the moment the bombs went off. Now all he could do was wait. 


	5. Chapter 5

The patrol stalked slowly on the other side of the officer barracks while Prortu silently removed the bomb casing and Kee knelt next to her with her weapon ready. The last thing they wanted to do was get into a firefight that would alert the enemy to their presence, but she would defend her leader's counterpart if necessary. And no matter how she worked to keep her breathing even, her heart pounded hard in her chest. 

Fortunately, it wasn't necessary yet, she thought as she heard the slightest sound of metal against metal as Prortu turned the casing back into place. A glance back told her she was ready to move to the next one. 

They edged up to the corner to watch the patrol walk past to harass the small group of workers who were dragging themselves back and forth among the shipping crates assembling various pieces of equipment. When they were sure the patrol was focused elsewhere, they dashed across behind the control building and began the same process. 

Kee knelt with her back to Prortu and watched the area around them. The thumping of her heart hadn't decreased one bit. She'd almost rather be in a full-on firefight than this unnerving anticipation. Beyond the lights of the construction zone, the forest was pitch black, but she knew her people were out there waiting for them to complete their task. 

A sudden metallic clank behind her made her jump, followed by a whispered curse. She spun around on the balls of her feet to see Prortu picking up the casing she'd dropped. Kee backed herself against the wall of the control building with her phaser ready, and watched in the direction the patrol would surely appear. 

In the eerie silence, she strained to hear anyone approaching. There was no way they hadn't heard the sharp sound. When none came, she inched closer to the corner only to hear a gravely footstep behind her, he'd come around the other side. She whirled around right into a phaser rifle pointed straight at her. 

"Hold it right there!" The Cardassian commanded. "Put the weapon down and put your hands where I can see them." 

Kee sized him up for a split second. Could she move fast enough to shoot him before he fired? Maybe, maybe not. She moved as slowly as possible as though she was going to obey while reaching for the knife in her belt. 

"Don't try it!" He barked at her. 

So much for that. She brought her hand up where he could see that it was empty. The tiniest glint of light off of a blade told her Prortu had slid a dagger out of her sleeve, so Kee continued making a show of setting her weapon on the ground. 

With a flash of movement, Prortu drove the blade into his knee. 

He grunted in pain through gritted teeth and staggered to the side. 

Kee was on her feet at once and slammed her phaser upward into his nose. He stumbled on one foot but stayed up. With all her strength, she slammed the butt of her phaser into his chest. As he toppled backward, she flipped her phaser around and shot him point-blank on the ground, leaving a charred hole in the side of his neck. Without a second glance at him, she visually scanned the area for others responding to the commotion while Prortu finished setting the bomb. 

"Here they come." Kee told her as she heard soldiers coming. 

"I'm done." She said, already moving away. 

The only way back to the cover of the trees was across the empty construction zone. The two Cardassians guarding the laborers arrived first and leaned around the corner of one of the buildings while others poured out of the barracks still fastening their uniforms. 

The two women took a couple of shots at them to hold them off as long as possible. 

In the distance, she could hear Cadda shouting to the now unguarded laborers, "Go! That way!" 

Before the newly awakened Cardassians could get into position, Kee and Prortu dashed across the clearing towards the trees, shooting behind them as they ran. 

"That's everybody." Prortu told her. 

Kee grabbed her communicator from her pocket and held it close to her mouth. "Blow it! Blow it!" She shouted to be heard over the weapons. 

No more than two seconds had passed when a hot shockwave threw her to the ground. For a moment, she was deaf and blind and unable to breathe the thick smoke. Her lungs burned either from the smoke she'd already inhaled or from holding her breath. Finally, her body began to function again and air filled her lungs. But the air was still so filled with smoke that she immediately started coughing. 

She wanted to turn to see the destruction they'd wrought, but the first sound to reach her was the unmistakable sound of some of the soldiers getting up with their own coughing fits. 

Forcing herself to breathe evenly and blinking away the tears from the stinging smoke, she pushed herself off of the ground. Prortu was nowhere, but her sight distance was very limited, she could be just an arm's length away and Kee wouldn't know it. In such a situation, each of them was responsible for getting themselves to safety, not go groping around blindly for each other. 

Despite the choking smoke burning her lungs and stinging her eyes, she bent down low to remain concealed as it began to dissipate and moved in the direction of the trees. Up ahead she could hear movement and weak coughing. Dry, raspy, not Cardassian. She moved closer to find one of the laborers struggling to catch his breath. 

The advancing Cardassians forgotten for a moment, she placed a hand on his back. With every cough, she could feel his bony ribs and spine shift under thin skin and a threadbare rag of a shirt. 

"I'm okay." He told her between breaths. "I just need to know what direction to go." 

Before she could answer, orange beams of light sliced through the air around them. "Anywhere away from them is fine." She said, but he was already moving away as quickly as he could manage in his condition. She followed close behind, walking backward to keep her face towards the enemy. 

Even once they entered the trees, they weren't safe yet, the Cardassians were moving in fast and the underbrush made it hard for her associate to get away. She fired back at the Cardassians to slow them down. She needed to get him to reasonable safety so she could double-back on the Cardassians and close in on them from behind. 

He stopped suddenly, causing her to bump into him. She glanced behind her to see that they'd come up against a drainage ditch at least as deep as she was tall. One of many that were required in this climate. "Can you get across?" She breathed. 

"I don't know. You should go without me." He said, followed by a stifled cough. 

"I won't leave you to them." 

"Go, the life of a resistance fighter is worth more than an old, decrepit laborer." 

She glanced toward the Cardassians then back at the ditch. If they went along the edge of the ditch, the Cardassians would be on them in less than a minute. She considered grabbing him and forcing him across, but she really wasn't sure if he could make it. The sounds of battle from her companions were far enough away that they couldn't help. 

Unsure if it was the right decision, she grabbed his arm and began guiding him to the slope of the ditch. "Come on." 

He resisted, but was far too weak to put up a fight. "I know you came here to stop the camp from being built not to save us, we just got in the way-" 

The end of his argument was cut off by a flash of phaser fire and he fell against her. The weeds intertwined in the ditch wrapped around her feet and they fell together down the embankment, rolling and tumbling over each other. When they reached the bottom, he laid limp across her chest, pinning her in the wet mud. 

To her relief, her fingers flexed around the grip of her phaser, but she realized that it, too, was pinned beneath the man. She tried to slide herself out from under him, carefully in case he was alive and injured. But then she looked up to see the head and shoulders of a Cardassian soldier peer down at her from the edge of the ditch. 

Fighting down panic, she twisted and pulled to get herself loose as the Cardassian raised his weapon at her. She just needed to get her phaser free, but the tangled vines made it impossible. 

Time slowed to a crawl as she waited for him to take aim. It seemed she was going to die here in a ditch with mud slowly seeping into her clothes. The soldier's weapon was aimed so precisely that she could see down the aperture to the emitter coils. 

Even though she was expecting it, the flash of the phaser startled her and it wasn't until the Cardassian collapsed that she realized it hadn't come from him. She turned toward the direction she'd vaguely registered that the shot came from and relief washed over her to see Traie looking down at her. 

She swallowed hard and released her hold on her phaser to free her arm. Pressing her fingers tentatively against the man's neck, she confirmed that he was dead and with some effort was able to roll his body far enough that she could slide herself out from under him and extract her phaser as well. 

She hated to leave his body where it fell, but this was still a war zone. She reached up to take Traie's outstretched hand and he pulled her up and out of the ditch. 

"Could you tell how many we caught in the blast?" She asked him as they concealed themselves from the enemy. 

"I'm not sure, but there are about a dozen that survived. Well, one less now." He said almost silently, watching a soldier stride past. 

It seemed silly to thank him for saving her, it was battle, that's what they did. But she wanted to do something to show him her appreciation... but now was not the time for that. She forced herself to watch the Cardassians, not him. It seemed like most of them had moved past them, beginning a standard search pattern. 

Together, she and Traie moved out of their hiding place and began stalking from behind. When they were close enough to one of them, they moved apart and took aim. On her count of three, they each fired a short blast and dove for cover. 

A shower of phaser fire rained down on their previous position from the other soldiers in the forest. 

Catching his eye, she pointed to the source of one of them and they moved in. They took down three more Cardassians this way until there was no more answering phaser fire from others in the immediate area. 

"Do you think they could have gone deeper into the forest?" He asked her. 

"There's one way to find out." 

There was still active phaser fire in the distance behind them and to the side, but they moved farther away from the clearing in search of stragglers lurking around, waiting for the resistance members to let down their guard. 

As they moved away from the lights, her vision had to adjust to the dark and all she could see of Traie was a dark silhouette and the occasional sheen of moonlight on his skin. 


	6. Chapter 6

Drik found that staring silently at Pran succeeded in getting him to work faster, though results still eluded him. Decades of experience with The Order had honed his ability to control his emotions, but this inept waste of scales came close to shattering all of that control. Him and this cold, damp, green planet. It had to have been pure luck that Pran stumbled upon such a significant discovery. 

A soft beeping on his control pad informed him of a perimeter breach. Some of those rebels must have ventured this way. Without a word, he ambled calmly into the forest toward the alert. 

He was in no hurry, they wouldn't get far, at least not with their weapons intact. A short distance inside the sensor perimeter, he'd set up an inverted EM feedback barrier that would render any electronic device that passed through it permanently inoperable. It would also prevent Pran from leaving the area with his equipment if he were to forget the motivational chat they'd had at the outset of this mission. 

Drik found it to be rare that anyone forgot his motivational chats. 

He slowed his pace even farther as he approached the barrier in the sector where the alert had gone off and slipped a device out of his pocket that would non-lethally incapacitate the trespasser. Nothing showed on sensors, but the Resistance was known for masking their biosigns. All he had to do was wait. 

* * * 

They had trudged a significant distance, zigzagging through the forest in their search. The comm remained silent, meaning Ren hadn't called the all-clear yet. There could still be Cardassians out here. The sudden whine of their phasers powering down stopped them in their tracks. 

She glanced down at her phaser to confirm it was offline then up at Traie. He looked as baffled as she was. While he checked his scanner, she pulled out her comm. 

"It's dead." He said. 

"Same here." Lastly, she slid her phaser's power cell out of its place to confirm it was dead too. "Some kind of EM suppression field?" 

"It happened about five paces back." He said and they walked cautiously back past where they had lost power, but nothing came back online. "More like some kind of EM corruption by the looks of it." 

There were no known natural EM perturbances out here. Her mind went back to the two techs she'd seen leave the settlement earlier, she hadn't given them much thought, maybe she should have. Her hand went to the knife on her belt, someone was out here with them, she could feel it. 

Then the trees started to sway... no, she realized, it wasn't the trees but her. She could no longer feel her arms and legs and her body suddenly seemed incredibly heavy. 

A twig snapped behind her and she managed to turn to see one of the Cardassian techs standing calmly with a pleased smile that didn't reach his eyes. Her mind was too numb to feel panic, it only registered his presence. 

The world suddenly tilted to the side and she felt herself falling. 

* * *

Pran kept his head down and focused on his scanner when he heard Drik shuffling through the forest much more loudly than when he'd left. The explosion in the distance and subsequent weapons fire was a sure sign of Resistance activity, meaning he would have an extremely limited amount of time to locate the artifact. The vein of ore at this location was so insignificant that Central Command would not risk a mining operation if there was any Resistance activity. 

He spared the briefest glance when Drik appeared, carrying an unconscious Bajoran female over his shoulder. He dumped her roughly onto the ground and set about binding her wrists. He'd assured Pran that there would be security measures to keep them safe while he conducted his search, and it seemed that he'd succeeded. 

When he was done, Drik left the girl where he'd dropped her and stalked back into the forest without a word. Beneath the placid façade, he was furious that their time had been cut short, Pran knew that much for sure. And that fury would come down on him just the same as it would on that girl if he didn't pinpoint a location soon. 

The scanner beeped defiantly at him as it once again failed to locate the source of the readings. He set about recalibrating it once again. No matter how much he hated working with Drik, he had to admit he was glad to finally be narrowing in on the source. 

He'd spent the last decade and a half since he first learned about the existence of the artifact combing through ancient rumors and sketchy evidence on worlds across the quadrant only to find that it was located on a world controlled by his own government. Then, sifting through mining survey reports, he'd found the anomalous readings he'd learned to associate with the artifact. 

It was only a matter of hours after that discovery when Drik had appeared and informed him that he would now be working for the Order. And it was not optional. No matter, Pran figured, he'd toiled away all those years with nothing to show for it, and at least now his work would finally contribute to the security of the empire. 

While he watched the scanner for any sign of success, Drik returned again, this time carrying a Bajoran male. He dumped him and bound his hands just like the girl. Apparently satisfied that they were no threat, he turned his terrifying attention to Pran. A look was all he needed to convey the question. 

"Nothing yet." He said, his throat suddenly dry. "The readings are just too faint. All I can say is that it's within this valley." 

"What could be causing the inaccuracy?" He said flatly. 

"I'm not sure. It could be the geology of this region, it could be that our instruments aren't sensitive enough, it could be those Prophets the Bajorans are always praying to for all I know." He said more sharply than he knew he should speak to Drik and ducked his head in submission. 

"Let us hope, for your sake, that it's a problem you can solve and not the latter." 

Pran wasn't sure if that was a joke or a threat or some kind of sick combination. "I _can_ tell you that it's not far below the surface, no more than a meter." 

He didn't respond, only continued to stare him down. 

Pran swallowed hard, "Ah, what... what are you planning to do with those two?" He stammered. 

"Them?" He said pleasantly as though he'd brought him a gift. "They're for you." 

Now it was Pran's turn to stare, but in bewilderment. What use could he possibly have for a couple of Bajoran teenagers. 

"To dig!" He said with as much exuberance as could be expected. "You're welcome." With that he clapped him on the back and walked toward them with a hypospray grasped loosely in his hand. 

That would make this go faster. If only he knew _where_ to dig. 


	7. Chapter 7

Kee woke with a surge of alarm and searing pain in her pounding chest. As the disorientation began to pass, she realized her face was in the dirt and her wrists were bound behind her back. Opening her eyes, she found that the sun had already come up. 

The Cardassian from before stood over her and grasped her arm to lift her up to her knees then moved over to Traie with a hypospray. Probably the same one that had awakened her. She watched him press the hypospray to his neck and Traie's entire body went stiff the way hers must have. His eyes flew open and he gaped in confusion for a moment before taking in their situation. The Cardassian grabbed the front of his shirt and hauled him to his knees, too. 

It took her a few moments to realize that there was functioning equipment here. Whatever had damaged their phasers must have been just a barrier not a field. Most urgently, though, she saw the handle of a phaser peek out of the Cardassian's jacket and a second one sitting near the other Cardassian. She had to assume both were functional. 

"You're probably wondering why I captured you and brought you here instead of killing you where you fell.' He said in an eerily pleasant voice. 

She exchanged a confused glance with Traie but remained silent. Her heart still raced from whatever that drug was. 

"You're here to assist my associate.' He bent down to a stack of equipment and held up a shovel. "With these.' 

A scoff erupted from her throat, "What makes you think we'll help you with anything?' She sneered. 

The smile still plastered on his face suddenly filled her with dread for a reason she couldn't pinpoint. "Because,' He set down the shovel and picked up something else she couldn't see. "When people do not cooperate, bad things tend to happen.' 

"Is that supposed to scare us.' It did, in fact, terrify her. There was a great deal he could do to coerce them into doing whatever he wanted. She'd been trained to resist a certain amount of torture, so had Traie, but if it was him, she knew she'd quickly fold. 

The Cardassian only sighed as one would do with an amusingly stubborn child and walked over to Traie, confirming her worst fear. With a flash of movement that contradicted his calm demeanor, he hauled him to his feet and shoved him face first against the nearest tree. 

Her stomach twisted when she could finally see what was in his hand: a laser torch. He grabbed his arm and held the blue flame up to his wrist. "I've found dismemberment to be rather motivating.' 

Traie cried out in pain as the flame touched his skin. 

"No!' She exclaimed before she realized it. "No, don't!' As much as she despised doing anything a Cardassian wanted, maybe it would buy them some time. "We'll do it.' She gave in. 

He didn't release Traie immediately, but turned to the other Cardassian who had been hunched over some kind of device the whole time. "I hope you're paying attention.' 

The other Cardassian looked up with an expression that said he hadn't been. 

To Kee's relief, the one with the terrifying smile finally turned off the laser torch and continued speaking to his companion. "You see, Bajoran females tend to be far more stubborn than their counterparts, so if you can convince her of the wisdom of obedience, he'll likely follow.' Even though his face changed very little, it was clear he was pleased with the revelation. 

A flash of hot furry flushed across her skin. For him to talk about them like some kind of animals to be analyzed and manipulated and controlled! If her hands weren't tied behind her back, she could have grabbed that shovel and smashed it across his smug face. Besides, Traie was every bit as stubborn as she was, he just knew better than to mouth off like she tended to do. 

"Pran, would you come over here for a moment?' He said as he casually pressed the laser torch to the back of Traie's neck. "Adjust these cuffs so he can work.' 

Pran reluctantly left what he was doing and obeyed. Kee didn't dare make a move, she could only watch an assume she'd be next. 

* * * 

"It's fried.' Joial said, handing Kee's communicator to Ren, but remained on his knee to inspect the scanner they'd found on the ground near it. 

"That explains why she's not answering. But where are they and what happened to the equipment?' 

About sunrise was when they realized Kee and Traie were missing. Joial, Ren and Cadda had headed in their last known direction. The only indication that they were on the right track was the inactive communicator and scanner surrounded by some broken bushes. 

The scanner was a lost cause, too, it looked as though something had fried all of the electrical components. If that was the case, their phasers would be down, too, and they were defenseless. He pulled out his own scanner to check for anomalous readings. 

"I don't like this.' Cadda said behind him. "The tracks leading away from here definitely weren't made by them, but there's no sign of a struggle, just a few broken branches.' 

She began to follow the trail just as his tricorder detected an inverted EM feedback barrier. "Stop!' 

She froze and turned back to him with a questioning look. 

"There's an EM barrier right in front of you. If you pass through it, everything will go dead.' 

She took a cautious step back, "Thanks.' 

Ren stood motionless, considering for a long time the trail left by whoever had their people and finally came to a decision. "Cadda, you and I will keep going. Joial, stay here with our gear and let the others know what we found. See if you can find a way to get through this without _this_ happening.' He tossed Kee's communicator back to him. 

Joial nodded and accepted their phasers and other equipment as the two went in with only a couple of knives to protect them. 

* * * 

Kee swallowed to try to wet her dry throat but it was no use as she hefted yet another shovel full of damp dirt to dump off to the side. Her arms weren't just tired, they were shaking now, a sure sign that her strength wouldn't hold out much longer. She tried shifting her grip to use a different muscle group, but it was no use, they were all near the point of failure. 

Pran had pointed them to one location after another in search of something, leaving pits behind them as deep as she was tall. At least they hadn't found whatever they were looking for yet. As soon as they did, Kee and Traie's usefulness to them would end and Drik would surely shoot them on the spot. Despite the exhaustion, at least continuing to dig would buy them time to come up with a way to escape. With all of their limbs attached. 

She observed Pran carefully for a moment. He was obviously some kind of scientist, probably fairly intelligent but clearly baffled by his inability to locate what he was looking for. And definitely terrified of Drik. He dug around in his pocket for a calibration stylus and when he pulled it out something else caught on it and came out with it and dropped to the ground. It looked like a Cardassian coin with a small, wrist-sized loop of chain attached to it. 

Pran snatched it up and shoved it back in his pocket with a fearful sidewise glance at Drik. Strange. Cardassians weren't usually sentimental like that. Or was is superstition? Also out of the ordinary for Cardassians, taboo, even. 

Drik always stood behind them, preventing her from observing him. The only reason she even knew his name was because Pran had said it once. He was not like other Cardassians she'd encountered. He was quiet, patient, observant, basically the exact opposite of others. That in itself was alarming. She understood other Cardassians enough to predict and at times manipulate them. 

And then there was that thin smile, like it was pasted on. It also was unlike other Cardassians. She'd seen them smile, but theirs could be categorized as smug, vicious or lecherous. Drik's, was... artificial was the only way she could describe it. Making him unreadable and unpredictable. How would he react to an act of defiance? She had no idea, only that any slowdown in their work was dealt with harshly as the stinging bruise high on her cheek bone reminded her. 

She had little hope that her friends would find them. If they managed to follow, they'd surely be disarmed too. 

She stole a covert glance at Traie, something else that wasn't allowed. A miniscule shake of his head told her he hadn't come up with anything either. It was hard enough to think of anything other than her aching muscles, the hunger pain in her stomach and fatigue from not sleeping for over fifty-two hours, but even if she'd been at her peak, this may have been a puzzle too hard for her. 

She jammed the shovel into the ground again and pried up another load. 


	8. Chapter 8

"They must be looking for something." Cadda said. She shifted anxiously next to Ren. 

_But what could that be?_ Ren thought. As they watched, one Cardassian passed a scanner around the area and indicated another dig location. Kee and Traie hoisted themselves out of the hole they'd dug and began another one. 

"I'm guessing that phaser works." Cadda mused again. 

He was certain the thought had crossed Kee's mind to use the shovel as a weapon, but it would be no match for the phaser pointed at them. The Cardassian with the scanner had a phaser tucked into his belt, so they'd need to be able to take him down, too. 

"We need a distraction." He said softly, but they'd had to leave all of their equipment behind. 

Cadda slipped her pack off of her back and began digging hurriedly through it. 

Ren watched her and waited to see what she was looking for. He honestly had no clue what she kept in her pack other than a set of clothes she wore when they needed to bluff their way into a Cardassian facility. By the look of these two Cardassians, he doubted that was what she was looking for. 

Finally, she pulled out an object and held it up to him with a smirk. 

"You devious rebel." He said appreciatively when he saw the old-style pipe bomb in her hand. How long had she had that? 

She smiled at the complement and slipped an old spark lighter out of her pocket. 

"Okay," He said, formulating a simple plan, "set it off over there." He pointed to the forest behind them, "I'll circle around and take on that one." He indicated the one with the scanner. "Kee and Traie will have to act quickly to take down the one with the phaser." 

"They will." She said confidently and moved away into the forest. 

"Give me about two minutes to get into position." He told her. She didn't acknowledge, but he knew she'd heard him. As for himself, he hurried around the excavation site so that he would be as close as possible to his target. 

Cadda was right, they didn't have to worry about those two doing what they needed to do. He was confident both of them were on constant watch for a way to gain the upper hand. All they needed was a second or two to react while their captors were distracted. 

He made it into position just a few seconds before he both heard and felt the explosion. 

While the Cardassians' heads were turned that direction, Ren rushed out of hiding and slammed his body into his target's, knocking him to the ground even as he fumbled for his phaser. 

During the scuffle, he heard the distinct sound of flat metal striking a body. He turned in time to see the end of Traie's strike to the Cardassian's midsection and Kee smash her shovel across his face. The accompanying sound of bone being crushed was both satisfying and gruesome. 

Ren pried the phaser out of the wriggling Cardassian's hands and pinned him down with his knee. 

Kee dropped to her knees for a moment to catch her breath. Judging by the holes dotting the area, they must have been at it for hours and were absolutely exhausted. Yet after a few breaths, she pushed herself up to her feet and walked over to the Cardassian they'd downed. 

"Thanks." She said, idly nudging the still-breathing Cardassian with her boot. Traie bent down and found a remote to release the restraints on their wrists and used them to cuff their prisoners. 

As soon as his prisoner was secured, Ren handed the phaser to Kee and hauled him to his knees. "So. Lookin' for something?" 

"His name's Pran." Kee offered. "He's some kind of tech, the other one is the dangerous one. Drik." 

Ren glanced at Drik. Traie had rolled him onto his side to apply the handcuffs and he could see that his entire ocular ridge had been caved in by the blow. "Unfortunately for Pran, all four of us are 'the dangerous one.'" He said in the most menacing tone he could manage. 

"Nothing you can do to me could possibly come close to what _he'll_ do to me if I tell you anything." Pran said with the edge of panic entering his voice. Even unconscious, he was more terrified of this Drik than four armed and angry Bajoran rebels. 

Without his eyes leaving Pran's face, Ren reached out for the phaser and Kee placed it in his hand. He pressed hard under the Cardassian's jaw. "Don't bet on it." 

"I'd rather be killed by you than _him_." 

"You're a smart man, Pran." Drik muttered, just coming to, and Ren had to admit, even in his condition, his voice sent chills down his spine. "If you say a word, I will personally make sure your death is as slow and painful as possible." 

What could possibly be buried in the woods of Joralla that would be important enough to demand the attention of a man like Drik? 

Despite the grotesquely flattened half of his face and the blood pouring from the wound, an insincere smile curled onto his face, all the more disturbing with blood seeping between his teeth. It took a moment before Ren realized he was fiddling with something in his hand. Traie saw it too and moved to stop him only to find his hand empty. 

He squeezed the skin between his thumb and first finger and a light glowed through his skin just before he and Pran shimmered out of existence. A moment later, the instruments Pran had been using sparked and popped until the screens went blank. 

"Dammit!" Ren shouted. He turned away, wanting to kick something, but managed to retain his composure. He turned back to Kee with a question he didn't have to voice. 

"I don't know." She said, somewhat deflated. If whatever they were here for was important enough for all of this, it was important enough for them to try again. 

With thoughts of landmines and booby traps forming in his mind, he began to detect the distant sound of Cardassian skimmers approaching. 

"Took them long enough." Cadda said, already starting back the way they'd come to meet up with the rest of their group. 

* * * 

Considering the slow response time, the skimmers were coming in fast. They ended up running at nearly a full sprint back to where Ren said he left Joial. He joined them without them even stopping. Branches and thorny vines whipped at her face, arms and legs, fallen trees blocked their path forcing them to go over or around, and slick mud puddles threatened every step. They helped each other over, around, across and through the obstacles. If those skimmers arrived while they were still in the area, their powerful sensors might be able to penetrate the dampening field. 

A locator beacon on Ren's communicator signaled that the others were close even before they heard them. The two groups joined together with a sudden halt and some hurried good byes as the cells began to go their separate ways. 

Traie stepped close to her and she mashed her lips against his for a rushed kiss. Her fingernails raked through his hair, desperately wishing they had more time together. 

"Get moving." Prortu warned and he reluctantly pulled away. 

Her fingers grasped his as long as possible as they turned in opposite directions. When she could finally hold on no longer, his fingers slipped out of hers and they resumed their urgent flight. 

\- - - 


	9. Chapter 9

_2384 - Bajor, Norvish Edda's residence_

Edda meandered down the hallway of his home toward the kitchen. Between himself and his soon-to-be wife, Jahri, he was usually the first one up in the morning and it was strange to already hear noises up ahead. He would never understand the intensity of his sister's lifestyle, especially her tendency to get up early enough in the morning to go running and get back just as he got out of bed. When she was supposed to be on vacation, no less! 

He came around the corner into the kitchen to find her leaned over with her forehead resting on the edge of the counter, face flushed and her legs flexed in a stretch while she waited for coffee to be ready. She'd booked lodging at some place in town and while he would have been happy to let her do that back before they'd reconciled, he'd now found himself insisting that she and her husband and daughter stay there at their family's home. It may have been deeded over to him, but it would always belong to both of them. 

There was no way she hadn't heard him come in, but so far, she hadn't responded. 

"You must have gotten up early." He said. 

She finally straightened up and retrieved her cup of coffee stepping to the side to allow him to get one too. "It's part of the job." She shrugged and took a slow sip. 

"Starfleet or spy?" He asked, taking his cup to the table. 

She slipped into the chair across from him. "Starfleet. And I'm not a 'spy'." 

"Sure." He said flatly. She had insisted that there was a difference between what she did and spying, but he didn't buy it. "Any interesting spy missions lately?" 

"I can't talk about that." She said, not bothering to correct him this time and busied herself wrapping an icepack around her knee. 

"What's that for?" 

"Oh, I twisted it chasing down a couple of Markalien smugglers last month." She said casually. 

He had to admit a twinge of jealousy at her exciting life compared to his relatively boring one. The most exciting that happened to him in the last couple of months was when a water reclamation valve broke and flooded the control room. A few years ago, he would have accused her of boasting, but he knew now that whatever happened, she was actually downplaying it. "I thought your Federation technology would have that healed by now." 

"Repetitive injuries don't heal so well." She shrugged. 

He wondered for a moment what else had happened but had a feeling he didn't want to know. After staring down into the dark liquid in his cup for a moment, he asked, "What are your plans for today. Assuming there aren't any smugglers for you to chase." 

"We're planning to take Iliah to the memorial." She said, idly turning her half-empty coffee cup around in a circle. 

He didn't have to ask her which of many memorials she planned to visit. The one in the capital was by far the most elegant and inclusive on the planet. It had taken hundreds of people years of combing through Bajoran Occupational Government records, Cardassian records and eyewitness statements to compile the most complete list of victims of the Occupation. Those names were then inscribed almost microscopically onto a replica of the old Bantaca spires that used to stand at the center of cities. 

"Iliah is always surrounded by her father's culture." She continued. "Which is fine, she's half human. But I want to make sure she experiences what it means to be Bajoran." 

"You should know, a group called the Organization for Historical Pacifism is planning to hold a rally near there today." He said carefully. 

Her eyes snapped to his, he had her complete attention now. "What's their issue?" 

"Well..." He said slowly, she wasn't going to like this. "One of their complaints is that almost all militia personnel had been part of the resistance." 

"Former militia." She corrected him. The militia officers that didn't convert over to Starfleet had become the Planetary Defense Force and still functioned the same as before, only planet-side. 

"Fine, but they still wear the old militia uniforms." He argued. 

"So what? The Resistance was essentially Bajor's military force before the Withdrawal, so it's natural for them to fulfill that role after." 

"And did you know that eighty-six percent of government officials, both local and worldwide, are also former resistance? Only one of our representatives to the Federation Council is not former Resistance." 

"What's wrong with that?" Her voice began to rise defensively. 

"Their point is that a small group of people are in governmental and military control of our world with little representation from anyone outside of the Resistance Elite." 

Kee blinked at that for a moment, she'd been away from home too long and obviously hadn't heard that term yet: Resistance Elite. "The type of people to join and survive the Resistance happen to be the same type of people who were willing and able to step up into positions of leadership. It's not a conspiracy. They're elected by the people for Prophets' sake!" 

"Yet the so-called 'heroes of the resistance' are in the highest possible positions." 

"And you buy into all of this?" 

"I didn't say I believe them, they just raise some interesting questions, that's all." That was the truth, at least. No matter how much he had disagreed with the Resistance methods, time had shown that what they did was necessary or they'd all have been dead before the Cardassians were done with their world. But that didn't mean their future needed to be controlled by the same people now. 

For once in probably her entire life, Kee was speechless, only shaking her head. 

"In any case, they're harmless, you just might want to keep your distance." He said to attempt to diffuse the argument that was without a doubt building in her mind. With his cup empty, he thought he'd better leave before she decided to start venting. 

* * *

The names carved into the Bantaca spire gave the stone an almost metallic sheen. Kee reached out and touched it as though by doing so she could touch the people themselves. Somewhere here were the names she had submitted: Oardoli, Walo, Ikis, Nin, Cidu, Yel, Shilri, Aarka, Prortu... Traie. Her heart tightened at the memories. She took a slow, shaking breath. 

Iliah leaned close and squinted to try to see the lettering. She couldn't possibly understand the meaning of this place. But that was a good thing, as long as she never forgot. 

The peaceful chirping of the birds in the lush gardens that surrounded the spire were occasionally disrupted by the voices of the protestors outside. 

She sighed, how they could possibly think this would be an appropriate place to hold a rally, she could not comprehend. 

"Just ignore them." Loren said gently, apparently reading her like an unlocked data padd. 

He was right, the best thing to do was ignore them. They had a right to be there as much as she did. Even if their presence was an offensive, distasteful, reprehensible, shameful, loathsome... there she went again. She consciously refocused her attention to the memorial. It was massive, towering high above them into the clear, blue sky. Even having lived through it, she could scarcely grasp the numbers: fifteen million. And the scale of the thing was simply mind-blowing. 

The volume from the rally increased suddenly and she turned angrily in their direction in time to see a fiery explosion blossom beyond the manicured trees and flowers. She instinctively grabbed her husband and child and threw them to the ground, narrowly avoiding a wave of debris. 

Kee was back on her feet before the smoke had cleared. "Keep her safe." She said to Loren and hurried in the direction of the explosion. There would certainly be officers on hand for security during the rally, but they could have been caught in the blast and it would take time for others to respond. 

She slapped her combadge, "This is Norvish Keedra, requesting any available Starfleet assistance." She didn't bother to wait for a response. The Endeavor was out of range, but the USS Sentinel was in orbit and a Starfleet planetary base not far away. 

She picked up her pace and sprinted through the ruined landscape and pieces of burned debris, coughing as she inadvertently breathed smoke deep into her lungs. 

When she arrived at the blast site, it appeared as though it had originated beneath the rally dais. There were no bodies in the immediate vicinity, but farther away she could see injured people picking themselves up and seeing to those who couldn't. And others who were clearly dead. There were several Planetary Defense officers already in control of the situation. 

She stepped toward a woman in a red uniform that was shouting orders. "I'm Lieutenant-commander Norv. What can I do to help?" 

The woman, a Lieutenant, was covered in soot, she had to have been close to the blast. Her eyes flicked down for an instant to the combadge pinned to Kee's civilian clothes, "We have the situation under control, medical teams are on their way. If you'd like to do something useful, make sure they stay out of the area." She said dismissively, pointing at a growing group of onlookers. 

Kee backed down reluctantly. Every piece of her desperately wanted to lead the investigation, hand out assignments, provide instruction. The years she'd spent as Security Chief and SI Agent demanded that she be involved, but she had no authority here and this wasn't the place or time for a battle of wills. 

This wasn't the time to pull rank, so she accepted the assignment and walked over to them. "Please stay back." She told them. 

At the sight of someone with seeming authority, they began demanding answers. 

_What happened?_

_Who is responsible?_

_Is the Circle back?_

_Is the Resistance retaliating against the protesters?_

All questions she wanted answers to as well. 


	10. Chapter 10

When a team from the Sentinel arrived, they, too, got assigned to crowd control while the Planetary Defense officers carried out the investigation on their own. At least the Starfleet medical officers had been allowed to assist, working closely alongside the Bajoran doctors and EMTs. Though medical professionals didn't tend to have the same jurisdiction hangups as officers of the law. 

Once they had barricades set up to keep people out of the investigation zone, Kee turned and walked straight for the small group of Defense officers clustered together. Forget jurisdiction, this was _her_ home, _her_ people who had been attacked and killed, and this memorial belonged to all Bajorans and they all deserved answers. 

As she joined the group, the Lieutenant who had sent her away before eyed her, but didn't challenge her presence, only continued to read from a padd another officer had handed her. "... identified as a cytromyaline device." 

Cytromyline. The Resistance had used it extensively, but it was widely available on the black market, that didn't narrow it down at all. "Has any trace of the ignition component been found?" She jumped in as though she belonged there. 

"Not yet." The Lieutenant said in an unfriendly tone. "But the use of cytromyline does suggest former Resistance members. It could be a lingering pocket of the Kohn-ma, for example." 

"Not necessarily." She risked incurring more wrath than was already aimed in her direction. The woman was too young to have been a member of the Resistance and probably had no first-hand experience with terrorism. "The Resistance used cytromyline because it was widely available, they're by far not the only ones. Ferengi, Cardassians, even the Romulans have used it at times." 

"You think the Romulans did this?" She said hostilely. 

Kee forced a smile instead of snapping back at her, "No, my point is, that the detonator will give us much more information than the chemical that was used." 

"Thank you for your experience and opinion," She said flatly. "Of course, we will be continuing to search for all evidence. We do actually know how to conduct an investigation without Starfleet's assistance." She said dismissively. 

She backed down once again and let them continue their discussion without her and spotted Loren at the perimeter, so she walked over to him. 

"Back in uniform, huh?" He teased, but she only shrugged, it was inevitable. She'd managed to slip away just long enough to replicate a uniform and change a few hours ago. "Iliah's with your brother." He told her without her having to ask. Actually, she wasn't going to, she knew he would have left her somewhere safe before coming here. "Finding anything?" 

"Not much that's useful. And they're not really that interested in our help anyway." 

"That's surprising. I would have thought they'd be happy to hand something like this over to Starfleet." 

"The thing is that when the majority of the militia was absorbed into Starfleet, those that chose not to and became Planetary Defense are the officers that didn't care much for Starfleet in the first place. Which makes them that much less likely to appreciate Starfleet's involvement now." 

He nodded thoughtfully. "That's why the former military organization is usually either abolished or completely converted to Starfleet when a planet joins the Federation." 

Kee snorted a short scoff, "That wouldn't have gone over well." As she understood it, one of Bajor's requirements for Federation membership was that they would keep a non-civilian, military defense force. The Federation representatives had agreed once it was explained to them why Bajorans would not accept a complete relinquishment of their military. 

She glanced around at the Starfleet uniforms distributed around the perimeter and shook her head. "There's not a lot I can do here, but I can't leave until I know who did this." 

"I understand." He reached across the barrier and kissed her cheek. "Let me know if anything happens." 

* * * 

The other Starfleet officers on the scene didn't seem nearly as bothered about being locked out of the investigation as Kee did. For the most part, they accepted their support role. Besides crowd control, which had actually become a much more difficult job as the day went on, they had set up an on-site trauma ward and a relief tent for meals and rest. 

All in all, Kee had been able to stay busy, which she was thankful for. Now she sat with some off the officers from the Sentinel that she'd been with most of the day: Lieutenant T'ploth, Security Chief aboard the Sentinel, Lieutenant Seywan, and Ensigns Marecki and Girard. They debated the upcoming parrises squares tournament enthusiastically but with somberness to match the events of that day. Three of them anyway, the Vulcan simply watched the exchange politely, and Kee, well... 

Kee stabbed aimlessly at her meal while watching them and other tables. One group of medical officers looked exhausted even though the day was only half over. At another table sat a group of Planetary Defense officers and she wondered when she had become more comfortable with off-worlders than her own people. If she were to sit with them, she would be the outsider, but here with her fellow officers felt completely natural. How did that happen? 

Some movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention and she spotted Lieutenant Doshi, the officer that had essentially dismissed her before, she'd learned her name from T'ploth, heading straight for her table. 

When she arrived, Kee waited for her to state her purpose, putting on her most diplomatic expression and hanging on to it tightly. 

"Commander Norv," Doshi said stiffly. "I want to _apologize_ for my earlier dismissive manner." It almost looked physically painful to say the words. 

Kee kept the shock off of her face and out of her voice. "That's not necessary." It really wasn't, apologies didn't mean a lot to her, but something was going on that had changed the situation. 

Doshi took a breath and couldn't manage to maintain eye contact. "This investigation is being turned over to Starfleet. Because of your presence on the scene and your prior experience, you are hereby in command." 

"What's happened?" She said with a sinking feeling. 

"Three more attacks in the last half hour. If you'll come with me, I'll get you up to speed." She said and turned to go back where she came from. 

Kee stood immediately and followed. 

When she fell into step with Doshi, she began. "All three were cytromyaline explosives set off at memorial sites in Jo'kala, Relliketh and Ilvia." 

"And why is Starfleet taking over?" 

"At the Ilvia site, there was a Cardassian spotted on the scene just before the bomb went off. He's been identified as a member of the True Way." 

She thought that group had been eliminated years ago, but with terrorist cells, she shouldn't have been surprised it wasn't. "You think they're responsible?" 

"You said yourself that cytromyaline is a common explosive and what else would they be doing here? We began scanning for Cardassian DNA traces at all four sites, but that makes this an off-world affair and Starfleet's jurisdiction." She handed her a padd with the investigation notes on it. 

"Thank you. Have Planetary Defense step up security at the other major memorials and government offices." 

"Already done. They're conducting munition sweeps now." 

"Good." She said, skimming the notes. She skipped past the casualty counts, she didn't need that information at the moment, and found the section about the Cardassian suspect, Dranol. Little was known about him except that he had been in the military, presumed dead during the Dominion assault on the Cardassians, then showed up years later in connection with the True Way. He could have been a sleeper within the military all along. 

"The Defense division in Ilvia is working on tracking him down." Doshi offered. "It shouldn't be difficult to find a Cardassian on Bajor." 

"It depends on where he's hiding. There were plenty of places for those of us with Cardassian warrants to hide from facial recognition during the Occupation." She said idly as she read through the rest of the notes, then looked up. "Continue to coordinate with the Ilvian team and pull in Starfleet as necessary." She said and let Doshi go. 

She got her wish, she was in charge, but she would have been happier if the situation hadn't escalated. 


	11. Chapter 11

The padd in her hand notified her that the casualty report had been updated again. Twenty-seven dead, two hundred fifty-three wounded. Traces of bomb casing at the Relliketh site had pointed toward Cardassian involvement, increasing the urgency of finding Dranol and whoever he was here with. 

Doshi stalked up to her, seeming to have put their earlier friction behind her. "Dranol was spotted about ten minutes ago in Tursa." She handed her a padd with a surveillance recording on it. 

"Tursa." She repeated thoughtfully, that was just inside Joralla, along the northern Ilvian border. 

"There's more. The Resistance kept a dampening field active in the Jorallan forest, correct?" 

"That's right, but it was shut down after the Withdrawal." 

"It's been reactivated." 

She didn't bother to hide the indignant expression on her face. They bombed Bajoran Occupation memorials, killed and wounded her brethren, then used the equipment her own cell had maintained and used to hide from them. 

There was no way to pinpoint biosigns from orbit, a detailed enough scan from lower altitude that could would take too much time, they couldn't even beam in to locations that were ideal for hiding without their atoms being scattered. The thing that kept her and the others safe so long ago was the thing that could allow the Cardassians to continue to carry out attacks on their own soil. 

"Damn it." She said. "At least we know where to look." However, there weren't many people available that knew the forest as well as she did. Ren was out patrolling the Badlands and wouldn't be back in comm range for another three days. Most of the rest of her cell was either off planet or civilian or both. "I'll take a team in. Get me a list of anyone in Defense or Starfleet that had been a member of one of the cells that operated out of Joralla." 

Doshi left to fulfil the request and Kee grabbed the nearest officer, which happened to be Lieutenant Seywan. "We're going to need survival gear and weapons." 

"For how many?" He asked. 

"I don't know yet." 

* * * 

Five. There were a total of five active duty officers available that had been in the Jorallan forest during the Occupation. The Sentinel had located and beamed all of them to a location just outside the dampening field. Kee assigned them each a team of four Starfleet officers. 

"We'll enter the forest at different locations." She handed them padds with their designated search areas as they double checked their gear. "Comm distance is limited by the dampening field. Cover as much area as you can as quickly as you can. Check known hideouts and safe zones first." 

Other officers behind her worked steadily to set up a command center in the field of an old abandoned farm. They would stay in contact with them as long as possible, Starfleet combadges were more powerful than what they'd used in the Resistance, but they would soon be out of range. She outlined a rough rout on the padd for her own search plans and submitted it to Lieutenant T'ploth who would be manning the command center. That rout, of course, assumed they didn't find a fresh trail to follow. 

"Have the Sentinel beam you into your start position when you're ready." She said with finality and waved her team to follow her across the field into the forest and slung her pack and phaser over her shoulder. 

She turned and walked backwards to face her team. Lieutenant Seywan, Ensign Girard, Lieutenant Ralka, former Resistance member from Janir, and Ensign Cetha. Cetha was one of a rush of Bajoran Starfleet graduates young enough to only have very early memories of the Occupation. 

"There's an old, rundown shack about a kelipate from the Ilvia border that can serve as a rest stop for one or two people. That'll be our first location. If we pick up a trail from there, great, otherwise we'll keep moving." She said, remembering the old place she'd spent the night in several times. That is, if it was still standing after all these years. Things tended to get reclaimed back into the forest when they went unused for a few years. 

She turned back around, actually excited to go back into the forest she'd once called home. 

* * * 

_Back on this damn, green planet._ Pran griped internally, but he didn't dare say so out loud. It had taken almost twenty years and a great deal of work on Drik's part to manage to get back to look for their artifact. 

Drik had made his life a living hell for that entire time. They'd had no cover story to be able to return before Central Command decided to pull out of the Bajor territory. Drik had nearly killed him for his inability to find the artifact that would have enabled them to wipe out the Resistance and retain their hold on the planet. Not to mention they could have crippled the Federation, Klingons and all of Cardassia's other enemies. 

If they'd had the final component of the weapon, they would not have had to end their war with the Federation in a stalemate, the civilian government couldn't have ousted Central Command, the Klingons would not have invaded their space and they would not have had to turn to the Dominion for survival leading to the near complete destruction of Cardassian society. All of this, Drik blamed on Pran's failure. 

If the Order hadn't been wiped out by the Dominion, they surely would have had a chance to return to Bajor much sooner, but the additional years had actually become an advantage. Technology had become more precise and the Federation ship, Voyager, had returned with information that Pran had been able to integrate into his formulas, providing him with a greater knowledge of what he was dealing with and how to filter out anomalous readings. 

Drik and Pran had been working alone since the fall of the Order and had almost no resources. What they did have went into the equipment Pran needed in order to actually find the artifact this time. But they'd found one group that had just enough remaining resources to get them here. It hadn't taken much prompting to convince the surviving members of the True Way to come to Bajor to carry out a series of attacks on the inferior race that had humiliated Cardassia so. For good measure, Pran had even assisted them on refining the effectiveness of their explosives. 

All they had to do now was to manage to sneak out of the Way's camp and get to the dig site without letting them know they'd been using them all along. Bajorans and the Federation may have been inferior, but they weren't stupid, it was only a matter of time before they located them out here. And he and Drik needed to be well away by then. 

The resources the Way had did not include any kind of mobile shelter, so they'd holed up in an old stone building he was fairly certain the Resistance had once used as a base of operations. There were old crates full of dead power cells and garbage. Other crates with weaponry and supplies. The controls for part of the network of sensor scramblers that were still in place and they had needed in order to conceal themselves for months leading up to the attacks. One room seemed to have been used for phaser practice with a target that resembled a Cardassian forehead painted on one wall, burned and pitted by phaser fire. 

The building was dank and dirty with no clue as to what such a building could be doing out in the middle of the forest, but it at least provided a roof to keep out the incessant drizzle. Pran suppressed a sigh at having to leave that roof behind as he and Drik prepared to slip away. 


	12. Chapter 12

For a moment, she thought it might not be there anymore, but as they made their way up the rise, a heap of vining plants in the rough shape of a building came into view. 

"There's something under that?" Girard said in astonishment. 

It certainly didn't look like anything had been disturbed in many years, but Kee pushed the plants away from the door to check anyway, scanning for traps as she went. Ralka and Seywan remained outside to keep watch while the other two followed her inside. 

Scrawled on the interior walls in stylized lettering were Resistance aphorisms. 

_Respect existence or expect Resistance._

_If you're not fighting them, you're helping them._

_There is no place like hope, except a city of dead Spoonheads._

_The only good Cardassian is a dead Cardassian._

_Resistance is built on hope._

Then somebody had added to that last one: _...and waffles._

She smiled at that and stepped carefully on the sagging floorboards that felt like they could give way at any moment and bent down to peek inside the crawlspace to confirm it was empty. She remembered doing exactly that same thing so long ago. Standing up, she prepared to leave when something brushed the edge of her memory and she looked more closely at a spot next to the doorpost. 

It was still there, a message Traie had carved. _"Always think outside the quadrilateral parallelogram."_

An undignified snort of laughter snuck out of her nose. 

"Something funny, Sir?" Girard asked. 

"It's nothing." She said and went back outside to check for evidence anyone had been in the area in the last fifteen years, but there was no sign of anything but a few animal tracks. It had been a long shot anyway, but it was so close to the border it made sense to check here first. 

She made a slow circuit of the area as the others looked around, too, ending her search at the edge of a bluff. The lush green blanket of underbrush stretched out before her from a dizzying height, interrupted by trees so thick three people couldn't wrap their arms around the trunks. Layer upon layer of hills, brush and trees as far as she could see into the hazy distance. 

Birds chirped in the canopy high above, overlapping their voices, competing with each other. Kee closed her eyes and breathed deep the scent of the forest, a combination of damp, cool air, robust soil and what could only be described as 'green'. She missed this place. 

"Sir?" Seywan interrupted her trance. 

"Sorry. I just forgot..." She trailed off and shook herself out of it. There were no leads here, so they began to climb down the way they'd come to move on to the next location. By the quality of the light, they probably wouldn't get there before dark and would have to make camp wherever they could. 

* * * 

Ensign Cetha exchanged a glance with Girard as they both bit into their field rations and worked to tear off a piece with their teeth. They'd eaten them from time to time during their years at the Academy, and she would have been overjoyed to have anything this filling to eat when she was a child during the Occupation, but it didn't mean she had to like it now. 

Commander Norv and Lieutenant Ralka didn't seem to mind, though. Either that or they were better at keeping their feelings to themselves. Probably both. She couldn't tell how Seywan was reacting to his, he paced slowly around the area, keeping watch over their small campsite. 

A strange, stuttering squawk reached them from somewhere deep in the forest. Cetha's head whipped around to peer into the darkness past the campfire with her heart racing, but she couldn't see a thing. 

"Don't worry, it's just the _Saakroth._ " Norv said calmly. 

"Is that some kind of animal?" 

She tipped her head to the side thoughtfully, "Yeah, we'll call it that." She said in a reassuring tone, but something about the way she said it had the opposite effect. 

There it was again. What could possibly make such a hellish sound? 

"It's okay, they only attack if you're alone." Norv said again. 

"What is it?" Girard asked, as tense as she was, he didn't tend to be the outdoors type. 

"You've never heard of the Saakroth?" Norv asked Cetha pointedly. 

She could only manage to shake her head, probably failing miserably to keep the fear off of her face as the creature sounded out again somewhere out there. 

"A long time ago, at least a hundred years before the Cardassians came, people at the edges of the forest began seeing this... well some people called it an apparition, some called it a monster, we'll just say 'creature'. But anyone who hadn't seen it for themselves claimed they were either lying or imagining things." 

"Why didn't they believe them?" Girard asked. 

"Because of how it was described." She said, leaning forward to lower her voice. "It was a quadruped of some kind, but its front feet were like hands with long bony fingers. It was hairless with only a strip of mangy, patchy fur running down its back. Ears like a bat. A double row of razor-sharp teeth in its mouth that opened wider than should be physically possible. It was the eyes that really bothered people. Some said they glowed red in the night, others said they looked unsettlingly humanoid. 

"The trouble began when farm animals would disappear from their stables at night only to be found dead days later at the edge of the forest, turned inside out with their entrails missing. Their only guess was that it was this creature that they named the Saakroth." 

Chills ran down Cetha's spine as the creature sounded out again, seeming to punctuate the Commander's story. 

"They put up fences and force fields, but the thing was intelligent and continued to take their animals. They never did find a way to stop it. When the Cardassians took over with their greater skill at erecting barriers, the attacks finally stopped and the Saakroth seemed to move into the forest to hunt wild animals." 

Campfire stories were a favorite pastime for cadets during survival training and she had to wonder if that's all this was, a story to scare rookies. That did nothing to slow her heartrate. She glanced at Ralka who was picking needles off of a fir branch and throwing them into the fire to watch them pop. His face was unreadable. 

"So, that would have been fine, right?" Norv continued. "Whatever it was went back into the forest where it had come from to hunt what was probably it's natural prey." She paused, but she could tell the story wasn't over. 

"One famer who had never believed the stories about the Saakroth in the first place, went beyond the authorized zone into the forest to pick wildberries. He found so many that he had to go back for more even though it was beginning to get dark and everyone knew that the Saakroth hunted at night. But he didn't believe in it so he went anyway. 

"There he was picking berries when he began to hear this awful sound. The shrieking call of the Saakroth. He dropped the berries that he had picked and ran home, but, you see, the Saakroth is fast. Something close to one hundred kilometers per hour. That's why some people had thought it was an apparition because they'd blink and it was gone." 

A twig snapped behind Cetha and she barely hid her jump. It was just Seywan, walking around, watching their backs. But it sent her heart racing just the same. 

"When the Saakroth caught up to him, he tried fighting it off with a stick, but it grabbed it with its humanoid-like hands and snapped it. It pressed its muzzle against the man's stomach, smelling his internal organs. It would have ripped him apart except in the struggle they tripped the barrier's proximity alarm and the creature was scared off. The man made it home, but its teeth had carved parallel lines across his chest down to the bone." She stared into the fire, allowing silence to fill the story. "They say there were others that may have been taken by the Saakroth and didn't live to tell about it." 

Cetha could only stare, wide eyed and out of the corner of her eye, she could see Girard do the same. Norv gave no indication in her steely stare whether the creature was real or the story was true so she looked to Ralka who continued to gaze into the fire, the only expression on his face was a tightness around his eyes. 

Finally, Norv's façade cracked and she began snickering into her hand. Ralka broke down laughing too. 

"In Janir, we called it the _Oamothu_." Ralka said. 

"Back on Earth we call it a Chupacabra." Seywan said, keeping his back to the group to save his night vision. 

"So, what is that sound, really?" Cetha asked, not ready to relax yet. 

Norv paused before tossing a piece of field ration into her mouth between laughs. "It's a _Teva_ hawk. About this big." She said, holding one hand twenty centimeters above the other. "It's harmless." She finally took a bite. "Unless you're a rodent." She added around the bite in her mouth. 

Cetha sighed, her heart rate still hadn't returned to normal and the hair on the back of her neck continued to stand on end. She was a graduate of Starfleet Academy, she should not be so easily scared. 

"That story scared me so bad when I first joined up." Norv admitted, still chuckling, then finally leaned back against a tree trunk and turned to Ralka. "So, what cell were you in in Janir?" 

"Lotaro." He answered simply. 

Norv blew out a short breath between her lips, but not quite a whistle. "You liberated the Oh'hurne camp, then?" 

He gave a non-committal sound. "Liberate would be a generous term. Over seventy percent of the workers were killed before we could get to them." 

"You shut it down, at least." 

"Yeah, we did." He said without pride. "What about you? Who were you with?" 

"Ren." 

"As in _Captain_ Ren?" He said with recognition on his face. "I've worked with him, he seems like a good leader." 

"The best." She said proudly. 

Their conversation meandered through topics that Cetha only vaguely understood. She was only five years old when the Cardassians left. All she remembered was the hunger, her father fretting every time she grew out of her shoes, not being allowed beyond the edges of her village or the sensors would be tripped and the Cardassians would come. 

The Cardassians, though, she remembered vividly. They were big, armored and terrifying. She stayed away from them as much as possible. Her one and only memory of her mother was of an angry Cardassian looming over her because she was in his way and her mother yanked her away and stood toe to toe with him, protecting her child. Other women in their village whisked her three-year-old self away and she never saw her mother again. 

Then there were those like Norv and Ralka. _The Resistance_ , she thought reverently. The ones who, like her mother, stood up to the Cardassians. Faced them head on and drove them off of their world. The ones who fought _them_ and killed _them_ and risked their lives fearlessly and bravely. 

She didn't know much about Ralka, they'd only met a matter of hours ago. Norv, however, was practically a legend among the Bajorans in Starfleet. She'd been the first Bajoran from the home planet to attend the Academy after the Withdrawal. Up until that point, the only Bajorans in Starfleet had either escaped the planet during the Occupation or were raised off-planet. And almost all of them were the latter. Cetha wanted to tell her that she's the reason she had joined, but couldn't quite find the words. It was probably better not to say anything anyway. 

The other two Bajorans had fallen silent, contemplative. Ralka continued to throw fir needles into the fire seeming to only look through it and soon began to hum a soft, slow tune. After a few notes, Cetha's stomach wrenched tight at the long-forgotten tune from her earliest memories. Sung only in secret, the melody was burned into her memory, but the words were gone. 

He'd hummed softly through the verse and chorus twice when Norv joined in, only humming the first line, then singing them almost in a whisper together with Ralka. 

"They've scattered and destroyed us and our history is done,

"Well they fell for their own lies, and that's why they can't see us rise, 

"All Bajorans side by side, in a war that's just begun."

Just like that, the words came back to her, flooding in with memories of people she knew long, long ago and she found herself joining in, too. 

"Cause we've been here ten thousand years, and we'll be here ten thousand more,"

Norv glanced up with an acknowledging smile and they continued together. 

"We will live and we will thrive as we have lived and thrived before.

"In our mountains, 'neath our skies, with our own stars in our eyes,

"We are proud to fight and die for our home, our heart, Bajor."

After a long while, she couldn't keep herself awake any longer and she laid down on the thin mat she had in her survival pack. Norv and Ralka continued to chat but lowered their voices to almost nothing. Cetha drifted off to sleep to memories of her childhood and the distant sound of the Teva hawk. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Resistance song lyrics by ArtemisTheHuntress from ["Our Home, Our Heart, Bajor"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22836871)


	13. Chapter 13

How was it that Kee had been happy about being back here trudging through the woods for days on end? The scenery was beautiful, yes, but it was way too warm this time of year for such a long journey. And the occasional rainstorms only provided enough moisture to make the mid-day air heavy and humid. The sweat that clung to her body would be even more of a disadvantage as soon as the sun went down. With supplies to cover only their most basic needs, cleanliness and freshness were low priority. It was hard to believe that she'd once lived in these woods only rarely having luxuries such as a shower or clean clothes. 

Their silence told her the rest of her group were as uncomfortable as she was. It had been hours since they'd said anything other than basic comments and responses from time to time. She didn't mind the quiet, enjoyed it even, but it was unusual for Humans, they tended to be so talkative. 

She stopped part way up a steep incline next to an unstable bluff to catch her breath and take a sip of water. The rest of her group slowed to a stop and took the chance to do the same. No matter their discomfort, not one of them had complained or fallen behind. Despite their varied backgrounds, they were all professionals. 

"Just past the ridge up there is where we should be able to get a comm signal through." She told them. There were places where the terrain caused weak spots in the dampening field if you knew what to look for. "We can probably take a break there." 

"Won't argue with that." Girard said and the others murmured their support. 

When they had all stashed their water packs back in their backpacks, she started up the hill again. They'd covered an impressive amount of forest in just two days and had checked on several old hideouts and sheltered areas that could have been used by the True Way as a base camp. None of them had any evidence that they'd been touched in the last fifteen years or more. 

Visiting these places necessarily meant confronting memories that she'd long since buried. Sights and smells that triggered the memory of a person long dead or a lost battle or failed mission. She did her best to stick to her training, maintain a professional detachment, they had a purpose here and reminiscing on old hurts didn't do anyone any good. 

Finally at the crest of the hill, she pulled out her tricorder to verify that the dampening field was weak enough here to get a signal through, so she tapped her combadge while her people found places to sit for a moment. "Norv to Tursa base." 

She waited a moment but there was no response. "Tursa base, this is Lieutenant-Commander Norv, please respond." 

This time, her call was met with static and a broken voice. _"... hear you... ... your signal... repeat..."_ It was T'ploth's voice. 

"This is Lieutenant-Commander Norv. We're receiving you, but just barely." 

Static again, _"... are boosting the signal, it should be more clear now."_

"Yes, that's much better. Report." 

_"Teams two, three and five have checked in, but have found no trace of the radicals."_

It hit her harder than she had expected, she used to be the one referred to as a 'radical' and it took her a moment to recover. 

"We have not located them either. Our location is 47.6131742 by 122.48249, we will continue moving in a west by north direction. There's an old pre-occupation building that I want to check out." 

_"Noted, Commander."_

"We will check in again at our next opportunity. Norv out." 

"So, what place is this?" Seywan asked. 

"It's an old inn that was shut down long before the occupation when one of the few roads that crossed through the forest was washed out. We used to use it as storage, a triage location for wounded, just about anything. It would have been an ideal base if it wasn't so far away from everything." 

"That's fascinating. How long had it been abandoned?" Seywan added. 

"Don't listen to him." Cetha said with amusement in her voice. "He's just trying to keep us from getting underway for as long as possible." 

"In that case," Kee said with a snicker, "We'll get moving _now_." She only just realized that she hadn't taken the opportunity to sit down herself, but it was too late now. 

Back down the other side of the hill was faster but more difficult. Downhill was always harder on the legs and feet. Much more risk of tripping or other injuries. And if one didn't have perfectly fitted shoes, damage to the toes was a real danger. One thing she could be thankful for were her Starfleet boots, no matter how the rest of her felt, her feet were happy. 

What T'ploth had said still stuck with her: _radicals_. The irony wasn't lost on her. Trudging through the forest, tracking down terrorists responsible for bombings. It was a strange side of the situation to be on, but in reality, it's the side she'd been on for most of her adult life. It was only now that it really hit her. She could remind herself that the Resistance had limited their strikes to military facilities as much as possible, and they were defending their home while these Cardassians were attacking hers, but it didn't change the eerie feeling in the pit of her stomach. 

"Commander." Girard called to her in an urgent, hushed tone. 

She crossed the distance over to him. When she reached him, she followed his eyes to the ground in front of him to see a partial boot print. 

She crouched down and pulled out her flashlight to get a closer look in the shadows, covering the light with her hand so it wouldn't shine around them. The print was large and fresh in the wet mud. The tread pattern was generic enough that she couldn't say definitively that it was from a Cardassian, but whoever it was, he was heading right to the same place they were. 

Before standing back up, she paused to listen to the forest sounds but heard only the wind and the occasional bird calling for a mate so she stood slowly and waved the others to continue forward. 

* * * 

Edda read through a new study on hydro-reclamation processes by Dr. Zosin from Deneb II. He'd been looking forward to sitting down with this paper for weeks, but found himself reading the same section over and over without really absorbing it. It was the only thing he could seem to do to keep from constantly checking the news feed in the aftermath of the bombings, which was the last thing he wanted to be doing with Iliah while her parents had gone off to do what they needed to do. 

Loren had told him that Kee went into the woods to track down the perpetrators, and with the exception of a few short hours of sleep each night he had also been away ferrying injured people in a shuttle to hospitals around the planet. Both of those jobs would probably take days more. 

Iliah didn't seem phased by the situation, probably used to her parents being pulled away during emergencies. He watched her for a moment as she tried to reassemble an old boat motor he'd given her to prevent her from doing the same thing to anything of value in the house. She had all of the parts arranged around her on an old sheet on the floor and she herself was covered in lake grime and grease. She set a gear in place and turned the part to make sure it worked. 

A creak from somewhere in the house caught his attention. He listened for it again in dead silence. It was an old house with frequent groans and pops as it continually settled, but he'd lived here long enough to know its sounds and he was fairly certain what he heard wasn't normal. 

The floor squeaked somewhere in the room below them, sending his heart racing. They weren't alone here. 

He turned to Iliah and she looked up at him with a knowing expression. Her little chest moved rapidly with her breathing. 

"Come on." He said, grabbing her grubby hand and leading her out of the room, avoiding known squeaky spots in the floor. He would never admit as much to his sister, but he'd heeded her warnings after her status as a spy was leaked and had scouted out some safe places in the house. He despised violence and was not above hiding, especially with a child entrusted to his care. 

The house itself was easy enough to get lost in for someone unfamiliar with the place. Hallways that lead to rooms that lead to entirely different hallways. Multiple paths from the upper floors to the lower ones and more than one exit to almost every room. He was reasonably certain it had been added onto more than once. 

Edda escorted Iliah through the house to the door to a seldom used, narrow staircase that led straight to the basement. In a time when the family was affluent, perhaps it had been used by house staff, though he hated the idea of his family having employed other Bajorans as servants of any kind. 

The door was creaky, so he turned the knob carefully and slowly opened it as far as he dared with the sounds of the intruder not far away. Iliah slipped inside and padded down the stairs a few steps with her socked feet. For him to get through, he had to open it wider and froze when the hinge squealed loudly. He hurried inside and closed the door as silently as he could. 

There was no lock on this door, so he held onto the knob while listening to footsteps stomping back and forth outside, not bothering to hide their position anymore. The footsteps faded and returned several times. He hadn't turned on the light in the stairwell and it was pitch black except for a sliver of light under the door. 

He glanced down at the faint outline of his niece. The tiny bit of light glinted off of her wide eyes enough that he could tell she was watching him. 

A shadow covered the light under the door, plunging them into complete darkness and he held the doorknob with both hands. 

The knob began to turn from the other side so he clamped tight to stop it, hoping the intruder would think it was locked. 

They tried again from the outside, turning it hard to try to break the supposed lock, but finally gave up. 

Then a hard _bang_ on the door, followed by two more. 

Iliah's shaking breath was the only sound she made. 

The door was thick, it would hold, he was sure. 

The light under the door suddenly reappeared and the intruder stomped away. To find a tool or something to ram the door with, it didn't matter. 

"Go. All the way down." He whispered to Iliah and he heard her shuffle quickly down. 

The stairs were steep and they had to step carefully, but they made it down quickly. At the bottom, he bade Iliah to be quiet while he cracked the door open to check to see that the basement was empty. When he was satisfied, he took her by the hand again and hurried past racks of old boating equipment and shelves full of gardening supplies. 

Far in the back of the huge and cluttered basement there was a pile of old Cardassian machinery that was primarily made of duranium. It had been left behind by those who had forced his mother's family out of their home to occupy it themselves. He'd never gotten around to getting rid of it, even before their economy was converted to match the moneyless Federation's when it would have been worth a bit of coin. 

Only half way there, he heard the upper door to the stairwell they'd just left bang open and heavy footsteps stumble down the narrow treads. They began running, but not before the intruder appeared, a Cardassian. 

He hadn't seen one of them in person since he was barely an adult. And for a moment he felt as young and helpless as Iliah. But remembering her snapped him out of it. 

"Go! Back there!" He told her and she ran for the corner. He turned around to the Cardassian who was already pointing a phaser at him. 

"Hey, I don't know what you want, but it doesn't have anything to do with us." He said, unable to keep the waver out of his voice. All he had to do was give Iliah time to wedge herself somewhere she couldn't be found. 

The Cardassian approached him. "Hands up." He commanded and when Edda complied, he grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around against a shelving unit. "Come out little girl or your uncle will have a hole in his head the size of yours." 

Edda winced at the thought of sweet, little Iliah hearing that and he prayed that she had enough sense to stay hidden. But she was her mother's daughter, so there was no telling what she might do. 

Above his head where the Cardassian had him pinned, his hand rested on some of the boating equipment. He knew every piece of equipment down there and where it was. Just to the left of his hand, there would be a length of rope. If he could move fast enough... 

The Cardassian's posture changed and Edda followed his line of sight to spot Iliah peeking out from her hiding place. The Cardassian removed the phaser from the back of Edda's head and began to turn it toward her. 

Edda's fingers wrapped around the rope. He pulled it down and swung it around to wrap around the Cardassian's neck, grasping the other end to pull it tight. Then he hauled him backward and threw him over his shoulder to the ground, surprised at how much it was like pulling a load of fish into a boat. 

The phaser slipped out of the Cardassian's hand and Edda fumbled to pick it up, pointing it uncertainly at their attacker. He backed up closer to Iliah. 

The Cardassian stood up with the rope now in his hands, seemingly unphased by the reversal of their weapons. He was probably right not to be. He looked military and old enough to have been in service during the Occupation. He was probably more lethal with a piece of twine than Edda would be with a phaser. 

Edda took another step back with his finger on the trigger. When the Cardassian lunged toward him he pressed it hard, slicing an erratic beam across the room, tripping and falling backwards in the process. 

He landed on his backside and searched for the Cardassian's location only to find him on the floor, with a diagonal phaser burn scorched across his neck and chest. 

Edda swallowed hard, his mind refused to accept what had just happened. But a creak in the floor above them meant he wouldn't have time to contemplate it. He scrambled to his feet and took Iliah back behind the machinery into the darkest corner of the basement. That much duranium would mostly shield them from scanners, all they had to do was contact Iliah's father for help. Assuming he was in range. 


	14. Chapter 14

Sight distance was limited by the dense number of trees and the moss and vines hanging from them would further conceal their approach. The log cabin style two-story building had excellent visibility from the front, overlooking a bluff with the rolling, tree-covered hills beyond. The rear of the building backed up to a notch carved into the side of the mountain, leaving only the sides and the roof to be defended. If they were smart, they'd have at least two lookouts stationed up there. 

Before they were within sight of the place, she stopped her group and crouched down low. "Seywan and Cetha, go around to the west side, see what you can find out about their numbers, positions and armaments. Ralka and Girard, same thing on the rear, north side of the building. See what's going on on the roof. I'll check out the east side. We'll meet back at Ralka and Girard's position." She said quietly. "Watch for trip sensors or booby traps. There may have been equipment left behind from the Resistance days that they could make use of." 

The team broke up into groups and hurried away, keeping low to stay below the cover of the plants. She hadn't taken but half a dozen steps before she spotted hints of a trip sensor. She knelt down and took out her tricorder, switching off the scanner entirely to avoid setting off the alarm. Then she adjusted the output allocator to a frequency that would cause the trip sensor's scan field to phase-shift into the visual range. The invisible grid lit up, extending to her left and right. She tilted her light up to see that it was just taller than she was, confirming that it was probably old, reused Resistance tech. Cardassian technology would have been much, much taller. 

She hadn't climbed a tree in a good decade, but she guessed that would be the easiest way over. She made sure her pack was tight and adjusted her phaser rifle strap so that it sat diagonally across her chest and jumped up to catch the lowest branch that reached across the trip sensor grid. She hoisted herself up high enough to hook a knee over the branch, left one leg dangling for balance and belly crawled across. Once she was on the other side, she dropped down, bending her knees to absorb the impact. 

Knowing it was just around the bend of the hill, Kee readied her phaser and kept her head down low. The old inn came into view and a pang of sadness cut through her, remembering the first time she'd been here. It was with Walo and Oardoli. The two of them and others had been like family to her for her first few years with the Resistance and their deaths had been sudden and terrible. Part of an incident that had marked her transition from being just a kid-member of the cell to being a hardened soldier. 

She shook the thoughts from her mind. Being with Starfleet for so long had softened her. She'd allowed her emotions to run much closer to the surface than ever before and she deliberately packed them back down deep. 

Creeping closer, she found a place to settle down and watch. The windows had been blacked out, but the sun was getting low enough that it was streaming through the trees sideways, lighting up the inside. The interior of the first floor had been gutted at some point early on in the Resistance days and she could see several silhouettes moving around, but nothing clear enough to identify how many targets they were dealing with. 

The upper floor windows were also blacked out, so there was little to see there either. She moved around where she could see along the front of the inn and spotted two Cardassians in civilian clothes guarding the door. She sat patiently, watching for anyone patrolling the area, but none came so she turned her focus to the roof. There they were, one Cardassian paced slowly along the flat roof, watching the forest for intruders. They had to be expecting this. 

She began to make her way up the hill to meet back with the others, keeping a close eye on the one on the roof in case he spotted her. When she was far enough up the hill to see the whole roof, she saw a second one there, watching the other side. 

At the same instant, both of them reacted to something she couldn't see or hear. One of them tapped the combadge attached to his forearm and spoke into it loud enough for her to hear his alarmed voice but not make out his words. They both raised their weapons and scanned the forest for intruders. 

Someone must have tripped a sensor, no way to tell who. In any case, they'd lost the element of surprise. "Move in!" She called into the forest, knowing her team would take whatever actions they could from their locations. 

Kee was high enough that she had to come down the hillside to the roof, half running, half skidding and firing ahead of her. The goal wasn't so much to hit the guards on the roof as it was to push them back from where she would come out of the woods. 

The plan worked, they backed away close to the roof hatch where just the head of a third Cardassian appeared. Two more phaser beams joined hers from nearby as she reached a point where she could stop and take aim from behind a tree, quickly picking off the two on the roof. The one hiding down inside the roof hatch was much more difficult. 

"Cover me." She called to Ralka and Girard. While they laid down cover fire, Kee dashed in close enough to the weapons fire that her skin tingled. When she was close enough for a sure shot, she knelt down with her phaser ready. The moment they ceased fire the hatch lifted up. She hesitated long enough to confirm it was the enemy and she shot him precisely in the chest just as he was registering her presence. 

The fall off of the ladder probably would be more painful when he woke up than the effect of a phaser on stun. With a quick peek inside for enemies, she jumped in and slid down the ladder with Ralka and Girard close behind, careful not to trip over the unconscious Cardassian. 

She signaled them to check the rooms while she continued toward the curved staircase that would come down into the center of the first floor. A quick peek below, all she could see from the upper floor were some moving shadows. She slipped off her pack, leaning it against the top of the banister and slid part way down the stairs on her back, using the small lip along the edge of the staircase as cover. 

She lifted up onto her side and fired several rapid shots toward the targets below and laid back down. Return fire pelted the ledge next to her, sending bits of splintered wood raining down on her face. Those were definitely not set on stun. Over the noise of the weapons, she couldn't hear whether she'd downed any of them. 

Sliding down a few more steps away from the disintegrating ledge, she waited for a decrease in the return fire and peeked up just over the ledge to fire back. This time she was sure she hit one and saw one on the floor from her first attack. 

There had to be at least one more. The amount of return fire before had to indicate more than one, she thought in the silence. She slipped the rest of the way down, ending at the bottom of the stairs with a crouch behind the banister post. 

The first floor was wide open except for the staircase. The last one had to be right here, there was nowhere else to hide. She began to lean out of her hiding place when a flash of movement came at her followed by bright, hot pain behind her eyes. 

She realized she was on her back on the floor and felt for her phaser, but it wasn't there. 

Sticky blood crept down her forehead along her eyebrow, but she didn't have time to assess the damage. A Cardassian pointed a phaser down at her. Her body was fully tense, ready to take advantage of an opportunity that may not come. 

Just when she was about to take a desperate chance to deflect the phaser away from herself, the window next to the front door shattered as two bodies tumbled inside. In the blur of movement, she could only tell that the two individuals were grappling, not who it was or who was winning. But it was the distraction she needed to lash out and grab hold of the phaser, pointing the tip away from her and the wrestling pair while she heel-kicked his shin and grabbed the back end of the phaser with her other hand. 

She used her lower position to pull him off of his center of gravity and down to the floor, wrenching the phaser out of his grasp as he fell next to her. She was on top of him instantly, pinning her knee into his back and pressing the phaser hard into the back of his neck. With a quick check to see that it was Seywan who had crashed through the window and that he had the upper hand, she pulled some restraints out of the back of her uniform and cuffed the struggling mass of scales beneath her. 

The front door banged open to admit Cetha, dragging another unconscious Cardassian in by the feet and Ralka trotted down the stairs with, "All clear." 

When Seywan had his Cardassian secured, he handed Kee a handkerchief and she pressed it to the wound above her eyebrow. "Damn it." She muttered to herself, she always seemed to get bloodied somehow. "Thanks." She added. Then to all of them. "Restrain them, wake them and line them up." She pulled the handkerchief away to test to see if the bleeding had stopped yet. Between the five of them, they had several dermal regenerators, but it wasn't bad enough to worry about it at the moment. 

While Ralka, Cetha and Girard cuffed and lined up the remainder of their prisoners, Kee headed over to the corner and knelt down. She flipped open her knife and inserted it between the telltale scratch marks between the floorboards to pry up the first one. 

Even with only one board removed, she could see they'd found the evidence to link these Cardassians to the bombings: weapon crates that would have both traces of cytromyaline and their DNA. For good measure, she lifted up the remainder of the loose boards with the tip of her boot and kicked them noisily out of the way. 

Just as she was turning back to the others, something caught her eye. Down between two of the crates there was something shiny and metallic. Like a piece of jewelry. Thinking it could be an earring from back when the Resistance used this place, she got back onto her knees and reached all the way down into the space. She just barely grasped a length of chain with her finger tips and brought it up to inspect it. 

It wasn't an earring, it was a coin, a Cardassian lek with a chain attached to it. She'd seen this somewhere before. She searched her memory, where was that? She'd been with Traie. Realization dawned on her, those two Cardassians that were looking for something buried in the ground. 

She stalked over to the line of eight Cardassians on their knees with their hands bound behind their backs and grabbed each of them by the jaw and turned their faces one by one to her, studying each one. But she didn't recognize any of them. 

They had to be here, she'd never seen a Cardassian with a charm like this before and she doubted the other one would have let him out of his site until their objective had been met. What were their names? She couldn't remember. But that dig site wasn't far from here. Maybe they were back there. 

"Who does this belong to?" She demanded, showing them the trinket. "Who's is it?!" But they only stared intently ahead. 

_Sir?_

A voice tugged her back to the present. "Sir?" Seywan repeated. 

She spun on her heels toward him. 

"We can deactivate the dampening field any time." 

"Not yet." She said, her thoughts already ahead of her. They had to locate them... Prick and Derf or something like that... and she had a good idea where to look. "Ralka and Cetha, think you can handle these guys on your own?" 

"Sure." Ralka said confidently. 

Cetha was less certain, but nodded. 

"Seywan and Girard, grab your packs, you're with me." She said, already out the door, gauging their best rout. 

* * * 

Drik glowered at Pran. He found he tended to work faster that way. Maybe it was just his imagination, but Pran did seem to scurry about at a faster pace while under his watchful eye. Maybe it was the sunken ocular ridge from the incident the last time they were here. He did find that people of any species had a hard time looking him in the eye anymore. Of course, he used that to his advantage as often as possible. 

Whenever Pran wasn't looking, he kept his eyes on the forest. Without the resources of the Order, he didn't have the luxury of EM fields to protect them, only his own wits, which so far had been amply adequate. But one could never be too careful, especially knowing that that Resistance bitch happened to be on the planet right now. 

After the incident, he'd managed to isolate traces of her DNA from his clothes where he'd carried her to the dig site, identified her in Central Command's records and tracked her movements as often as she came up on his radar. She was Starfleet, she was nearby and she was Bajoran. All of that was enough for him to assume she would be part of the team looking for the last remnant of the True Way. 

Cardassians didn't believe in providence or luck or any kind of universal plan. If they did, he would have labeled her being here as that, but it was simply a bad coincidence. Whatever label one wanted to put on it, as soon as he found out that she was here, he was determined to exact retribution for what she did to him. His fingers gently brushed the mangled ocular ridge at the thought, but he dropped his hand before Pran could see. 

It hadn't taken much fabrication to convince two members of the True Way to track down her child. He already knew that she'd become an intelligence agent, so it was logical to suggest to them that she'd been sent by Starfleet Intelligence to stop their attack. He hadn't decided what to do with the girl once he had her, he'd decided to leave that up to whatever whim struck him at the time. It had already given him a great deal of joy mulling over the possibilities. 

"I've confirmed readings of sporocystian remains consistent with the entity the Voyager encountered." Pran said excitedly. 

"Are you certain? We're at least three kellipates away from the previous location." He said, using the local measurement. 

"Yes. The readings before had some distortions that I hadn't realized were a result of refraction due to the local geology." 

"You 'hadn't realized'?" He said harshly. 

Pran glanced up nervously, but returned to his scanner. "Tha- That's why I had such a hard time finding an exact location, but now I'm not picking up any distortions. It's identical to the records you collected from the Federation on that lifeform." 

"Then you'd better start digging." 

Drik's eyes fell briefly to the crate containing the other components of the weapon. Despite the frustration of it, the delay in locating the remains did at least give them time to study the device so that once they had the remains, they would be able to make use of it immediately. 

According to Pran, the sporocystian remains retained a residual energy signature that was unique and without substitute that gave the weapon it's immense power. He'd waisted a fair amount of time attempting to locate another specimen without success. 

While Pran started digging Drik reviewed his target priorities. They would first use the autonomous transporter implant in his hand to beam aboard and take control of one of the ships in orbit. After that, they could begin an orbital bombardment, destroying one continent at a time. He would have to deal with their meddling Bajoran and her daughter before that, he made a mental note. Then, on to the Federation, the Klingons, the Romulans and the Breen. If he had time, he'd head through the wormhole, too. 

Ah, the times they were going to have. 


	15. Chapter 15

The medical transport shuttle Balock swung around in a tight arc. Loren's panel lit up warning him that he had exceeded safety limits on both speed and vector, but he knew how far past the guidelines he could push these ships. 

He'd received the message from Edda just as he had finished transferring an injured woman to a hospital in Tamulna and came as fast as he could within atmospheric speeds. It had been minutes, but felt like hours with a knot in the pit of his stomach. Each second ticked by achingly slow. 

He set the shuttle down on the grass near the house without the finesse he usually flew with, all the while wishing Kee was here with him. He was a trained Starfleet officer, he was perfectly capable of carrying out a rescue mission, but Kee was an experienced security officer. She was also relentless and cunning. And... well... Kee was Kee. But she was out of contact somewhere in that forest out there. 

The moment the landing struts touched the ground, he slapped the control to open the hatch and launched himself out of the pilot's chair. Slowing only long enough to grab two phasers from the storage locker on the wall, he squeezed through the hatch before it was fully open, attaching one phaser to his uniform and preparing for a fight with the other. 

The clearing at the back of the house where he had landed was empty, so he watched for movement up in the windows while he quickly made for the rear basement door where Edda's hurried message said they were hiding. He sidled up to the door and pressed his thumb to the pad to unlock it. The lock was a recent upgrade while the door was an old knob style. 

He turned the knob slowly and slipped inside without a sound. Only a third of the lights were on, leaving plenty of places for Edda and Iliah or the intruder to hide. 

Creeping in farther, he saw the body of the dead Cardassian Edda had told him about. A little farther and he saw another body on the floor. It wasn't a Cardassian, it had to be his brother-in-law. 

_Oh no._ His stomach twisted and he hurried over. 

Before he reached him, though, and to his relief, he could see that he was still breathing. Kneeling down, he gently turned him over onto his back. Based on the fresh blood seeping out of the wound on his forehead, the attack had just happened. 

"Hey." He snapped his fingers in front of his face. "Edda, come on." 

His eyes cracked open with a strained breath. "He got her." 

"Where'd they go?" 

"He was going to take her outside, but when he heard your shuttle, he went upstairs." He said, pushing himself off of the floor. 

"Show me." 

Edda nodded gently, his head probably hurt badly. Loren gave him the phaser in his hand but he only held it in an open palm, glancing apprehensively at the Cardassian's body. 

"It's on stun, just hit this key to fire." Loren said, hoping he read his hesitation correctly. 

Edda swallowed hard and gripped the phaser securely. "They went this way." 

* * * 

Iliah kicked wildly to try to escape the Cardassian's grip but he held her tight under his arm, leaving her legs to flail uselessly behind his back. Her hands were equally useless, he'd wrapped fabrication tape tight around her wrists and put a piece across her mouth. But, no matter how ineffective, she continued to fight. 

Just like her mother would. 

Maybe she could slow him down enough for her daddy to come find them. 

With the tape over her mouth, she felt like she would suffocate. Her lungs hurt from trying to get enough air through only her nose. But she had to fight harder. She didn't know what would happen to her if he was able to take her away. He already might have killed her uncle, but she didn't want to think about that. Her mother grew up with men like this. She was strong, so Iliah would be strong, too. 

They came to a narrow place in the upstairs hallway and she suddenly kicked against the wall, causing the Cardassian to stumble. She took her chance to squirm free of his grasp and ran back into a sitting room that had another way out. 

As she ran, she raised her hands above her head and swung them down and apart as hard and fast as she could to break the fabrication tape. As soon as her hands were free, she peeled the tape from her mouth. 

"Daddy!" She screamed. "Daddy!" He was here somewhere, he would find her, but the Cardassian was catching up fast. If she could get far enough ahead of him, there were places she could hide, but he was too close. 

She sped around a corner, but not fast enough. A strong pair of hands grabbed her roughly around her middle. She shrieked and fought as he held her arms tight against her chest with one arm and pulled her legs against his body with his other arm. No matter how she fought and jerked, she couldn't get free again. 

Something hard pressed against her side and she guessed it was a phaser. "I can shoot you without killing you." He warned and she finally stopped fighting. 

* * * 

_"Daddy!"_

Iliah's gut wrenching shriek sounded through the house for the second time but Loren couldn't quite pinpoint her location. 

"They're in the upstairs drawing room." Edda said quietly behind him. 

That was just past the top of the stairs. They must have come up the back stairs and entered through the service hallway. He crept up the central stairwell, stopping half way and opened his tricorder to scan the area but picked up nothing. He must have been carrying a scattering device. 

"Do the windows in that room open?" Loren whispered. 

"No. Do you think he's trying to get out?" 

"I don't think he intends to get pinned down inside. He must expect that I called in the cavalry on my way over. They should be here soon." He paused to listen, but couldn't hear anything at first until he picked up a tiny sniffle. "He must not be able to beam out or he would have done it already." 

Loren continued up the stairs and inched closer to the wide doorway to the drawing room with Edda following uncertainly. Just as he prepared to peek around the corner, they heard the sharp sound of shattering glass. 

He whipped around the corner in time to catch a glimpse of the Cardassian step through the broken window with Iliah and jump down onto a ledge outside. He took aim, but thought better of it. If he were to shoot him up there, Iliah could fall. Instead, he rushed over to follow. 

From the window he could see the Cardassian hurry down a section of roofline that ran below the drawing room's bank of windows. 

Before he reached the eve, the Cardassian's foot punched through a weak spot on the roof. He dropped to his knee and Iliah tumbled out of his arms. With a scream, she rolled uncontrollably off of the edge, barely grabbing the lip of the gutter with her fingertips. 

Edda was suddenly at Loren's side. "I've been meaning to fix that." 

While the Cardassian extricated his leg from the hole, Iliah dropped down to the ground and ran off into the garden. _Good girl_ , he thought. 

The Cardassian took a couple of shots at her heels, but she disappeared between tall trellises that held up vining plants. 

Loren took aim, but the Cardassian jumped down from the roof and out of his line of sight, so he hurriedly climbed over the broken glass. 

"I'll go the other way." Edda called as he sailed out of the room. 

Loren scooted down the slanted roof careful not to slip on the wet shingles. He just barely caught sight of the Cardassian rounding the corner into the garden after Iliah and jumped down onto the soggy ground, springing immediately into a run. 

Phaser first, he checked down the first row, then the next when he saw the Cardassian vanish between the garden boxes. 

"Hold it!" he heard Edda call from up ahead. 

Loren squeezed between plants and leaned out just far enough to see Edda holding a phaser in his shaking hand, the Cardassian sizing him up, knowing he wouldn't do it and Iliah hiding within the berry bushes between them. 

With the distraction, Loren took aim and as the Cardassian raised the weapon toward Edda, Loren fired, striking him between the shoulder blades with the highest stun setting. As he fell, the weapon discharged in a wide arc. Edda dropped flat on the ground as the beam sailed over his head. 

"Daddy!" Iliah burst out of hiding and slammed into his chest at full speed. 

He wrapped his arms around his baby girl, "It's okay baby, you're safe." He said trying to keep the waver out of his voice. 


	16. Chapter 16

Girard walked about five meters to the side of Seywan who was about five meters to the side of Norv. Spreading out would allow them to move through the forest without leaving as much of a trail behind. At least that much was consistent with his survival training, like the Dakota fire hole she'd had them dig last night. Other methods the CO employed were less familiar. 

The use of the most inconspicuous navigational markers that would go unnoticed by pursuers, for example, but were reliable enough to her even now that she was able to accurately lead them through kilometer after kilometer of indistinguishable forest. A rope tied up in a tree with a specific number of knots, or channel cut into a boulder to indicate a north-south direction. It was fairly ingenious, really. People tended to come up with some pretty impressive methods when their lives were on the line. 

Take the dampening field itself. Even with state-of-the-art technology, maintaining a network like that to block sensors from such a huge area of wilderness would be a massive undertaking. Add to that the certainty that the Resistance would have had to use mismatched, rundown and obsolete tech made it more unbelievable. Yet here it was, still in working order more than fifteen years after it had last been used. 

"Did you ever find out what they were looking for?" Seywan asked after she'd briefed them on the situation. 

"No. But whatever it is, it's important enough for them to come after it again after all these years..." Her voice trailed off at the end as they broke out of the thick, tall trees into a field of smaller trees, very uniform in height as though something or someone had cleared out all of the older trees, allowing a large number of seedlings to establish themselves all at once. 

Norv stepped carefully, almost reverently into the shoulder-height trees, attentive to every shadow and every sound and her two companions followed. 

A few steps into the area, Girard's foot came down on something hard and he bent down for a closer look. Under his boot he found a twisted and blackened piece of metal, holding it up for the others. "What happened here?" 

"War." Was the Commander's flat reply, then she continued on toward some unseen destination ahead. 

Now that he looked closer, he could see rubble from some kind of structures that were almost completely hidden by forest plants. His best guess was that these had been Cardassian structures and the Resistance had destroyed them. He supposed it could really be that simple. If it was significant to their current objective, he was confident she would inform them. 

Passing amorphic piles of wild vines that probably covered more of the debris, they moved out of the area and back to what he had come to know as the _normal_ forest: massive trees, fallen logs covered in moss, and lots and lots of underbrush. Just inside, they were stopped by a deep runoff ditch that went to the left and right as far as they could see and the whole thing was filled in with even more vines. 

Norv walked to the side along the edge of the ditch, gazing down as though looking for something. She stopped suddenly and took a few steps down the slope into the ditch. Without a word, she pulled at the vines. 

He could see now that the ditch was a lot deeper than it looked and when she had successfully dislodged a wad of the vines and tossed them up onto the side, what it revealed at the bottom of the ditch made him stop cold. There was a body down there. Badly decomposed, almost nothing left but the skeleton, clothes and hair. 

Norv, however, was unphased by the site. She dropped the rest of the way down to crouch next to the remains and reached down to reverently pick up a Bajoran earring. 

"Who was he?" Seywan asked. 

She didn't answer immediately, only draped the earring across her hand for a moment. "I don't know." She said finally, shaking her head. "Someone we couldn't save." Her voice caught. This entire mission, he'd never heard pain in her voice until now and it struck him how difficult it must have been for her to be here, going to these places. Yet she'd never let on until now. 

With a slow inhale, she tucked the earring into a pocket on the side of her pack and stood to climb out of the ditch on the other side. 

Seywan and Girard moved to the side to avoid the remains and followed. 

* * * 

Kee ducked under the trunk of an old tree that had fallen against another one and leaned at an angle, then stepped over a rock that protruded out of the ground. They'd already passed the point where the EM feedback barrier had previously rendered their equipment inoperable and they'd first encountered Drik. 

A chill ran down her spine at the memory of his terrifying phony smile and what he could have done to them. 

The dig site should be right up ahead. If they were here, she should hear something by now. Voices. Rustling of branches. The hum of equipment at the very least, but there was only the silence of dusk. Could she have been completely wrong? 

No, he had to be here. She'd seen the _lek_ on a chain only once before, it had to be him. And it had to be somewhere here. 

Before she realized it, they were right on top of the old dig site, grown over and filled in over time. She kicked a tangle of vines away from one of the holes, now only a slight indentation in the ground. Her heart ached despite herself. Working side by side with _him_. It was a miserable experience, but at least they'd been together then. For all of the many ways her life was better now, she ached to be back there with him for just a moment. Just one kiss. One breath of his scent. Or stroke of his hand. 

She swallowed hard and shook herself out of it before the others could notice. "This is where they were before." 

"Maybe they were wrong the first time and that's why you couldn't find it." Seywan offered. 

She searched the darkening forest around them for any indication. For all they knew they could have gone in the exact opposite direction from the inn. She started to slip her pack off of her shoulders. "It's getting dark, maybe we should-" 

A metallic clink stopped her dead and her eyes snapped to Seywan's, he heard it too. So did Girard. 

"It came from that direction." Seywan said, pointing in the direction the sound had come from. 

"Let's go." 

* * * 

This was, by far, the most excitement Pran had ever sensed from Drik. He hovered near by, anxiously watching while Pran unearthed an old, leather-bound box. Anxious by Drik standards, at least. In actuality, he simply leaned closer with his attention focused on the box. Coming from him, that was the equivalent of someone else jumping up and down with glee. 

From the time his shovel struck the metal latch, it took Pran several minutes to fully expose the box. As soon as he found all four corners, he knelt down on his knees and reached in to lift it out. 

This was it. The thing he'd spent the last twenty years searching for. He'd sacrificed every other aspect of his life, lived under Drik's constant shadow and agonized over every detail to find this one object. He almost reverently grasped the latch and turned it only to find it was locked. No matter, he stood and placed the tip of the shovel against the mechanism and used his foot to jam it into the lock which popped open. 

When he folded back the lid of the box, it was nothing like what he'd expected to find. All he knew about it was that it was the remains of a sporisistian life form. He'd imagined a mummified piece of flesh or some kind of desiccated tissue. Instead, it looked like a cluster of crystals that glittered under the light of Drik's flashlight. 

Just as he lifted it up out of the box, a device on Drik's belt sounded an alarm. Someone had tracked them. 

Pran hurriedly carried the artifact to the mechanical component of the weapon and placed it into the reaction chamber. When he'd originally learned of its existence, he'd envisioned a traditionally-shaped device. Something like a large phaser rifle, perhaps. But as he began to piece it together, he'd found that it was more like a small, mobile console. Not much more than a box with a control screen. 

"We need to test it." He told Drik. 

"Not here, we must leave the area." 

Pran hoisted the weapon's strap, which had been his own addition, and began to gather his equipment. 

"Leave it. You won't need any of it soon." Drik said and ushered him into the woods with his hand weapon drawn. His words and tone struck a deep dread in Pran's stomach that he'd ignored all these years, but he obeyed, struggling under the weapon's weight. 


	17. Chapter 17

They were close. Kee could hear someone moving quickly through the forest away from them up ahead. She was about to rush in after them when she heard the sudden zip of something small and sharp flying through the air followed by a wet impact. 

She spun to see Girard clutch his bleeding neck. She was in motion instantly and reached him before he'd fallen all the way to the ground, visually scanning the area around them for the enemy but didn't spot anything. 

He was bleeding, but not yet hemorrhaging and not dead. The guttural sound that came from his throat instead of a scream told her the projectile had pierced his larynx. Cradling his upper body with one hand, she pulled out her tricorder to scan him. 

Seywan moved toward them, ducking low to the ground as more projectiles sailed over his head. But there was no indication of an enemy nearby, it must have been something automated. That told her they were on the right track. 

"It pierced your artery and is lodged in your larynx." She told Girard who looked close to passing out. "I need you to focus on me." She said sternly. 

Next to her, Seywan readied a med kit. 

"I'm going to pull it out and hold the blood vessel closed while Seywan uses a dermal regenerator." 

Girard jerked his head up in an attempted nod. 

"This is going to hurt. A lot. Keep your focus on me." 

When Seywan nodded his readiness, Kee slipped her hand out from under his body and pressed her fingers on either side of the entry point. 

Girard's body tensed in pain already, so she moved as quickly as she could to grasp the end of the projectile and pull it out. It was so slick with blood that her fingers slipped off the first time and his body lurched in pain, nearly causing her to lose her finger position. 

She tried again and it slid out with a gush of blood. She pressed hard on his artery to stop the blood flow while Seywan hurried to seal the hold in his trachea before he drowned in his own blood. 

Girard's body heaved again as blood trickled down toward his lungs and he tried valiantly not to cough. 

"Hey." She said sharply. "Look at me. Focus on my voice." 

With effort his eyes locked onto hers while Seywan worked quickly. 

"Listen to my voice. My voice is your anchor. You will not be swept away by the pain. The pain is temporary." She said firmly and evenly. 

He grasped a fistful of leaves in one hand and her uniform in the other but kept his eyes focused on her. 

"You'll get through this. We're right here with you." 

Seywan moved to the injury on his blood vessel, passing the dermal regenerator between her fingertips. Half way done, but Girard hadn't relaxed at all, still struggling not to cough. 

"Almost there." She soothed without breaking his gaze. 

"Done." Seywan said and pulled away. 

Girard rolled over onto his stomach, choking and gasping. Spattering blood across the dirt. 

"Careful." Kee warned. The repair was temporary, if he was too rough, it could still break open. 

As soon as the worst had passed and he had his coughing under control, Kee retrieved the tricorder from where she'd set it down next to him and adjusted the output allocator again with one hand while keeping a steady hand on Girard's gasping back. 

The moment the modifications came online, a network of trip sensors lit up across the forest floor, one just beyond where Girard had fallen. She could get through it if she stepped carefully. 

She glanced up at Seywan, "Stay with him. I'll keep tracking them." 

Girard choked out what was intended to be a protest, but nothing came out. 

"He can't be left alone." She continued, "If you think he can be moved, get back to the others slow and steady. Otherwise, make camp here and wait it all out." 

"Sir, I don't think that's a good idea. You don't know what you're going into up ahead. You said there were only two of them before, there could be more now. A lot more. And we don't know how heavily armed they are." 

"That's exactly my point, we can't take Girard with us into that situation and we can't leave him alone." 

"Sir-" 

"Lieutenant, your concern is noted but I've made my decision. This is my home, my forest. Regardless of their manpower or armaments, they don't know this place like I do. I was tracking Cardassians through this place when you were still in grade school. Don't worry about me, you take care of Girard." 

He visibly clamped down on his next argument. She may not be his usual CO, but like any good officer, he would follow her orders, he would take care of his colleague. The ensign needed medical assistance right away and, barring that, he needed very careful field care. She hadn't lost someone under her command for a very long time and she wasn't willing to let it happen now. 

"Yes, sir." Seywan said finally. 

While he turned to care for Girard, Kee began to pick carefully through the trip sensors 

Her progress was much better once she'd passed the last of the trip sensors and she'd traveled just far enough over the twisting and hilly terrain that she was fully out of range of the last two members of her team. Through a break in the trees she found it, a fresh dig site. Sensor and excavation equipment had been left where it was used near a deep hole in the ground. 

At her feet, on top of a loose pile of the contents of the hole sat an old, dirty, leather-bound box with a metal latch that had been hacked open. With the tip of her boot, she tipped the box over to see that it was empty. Whatever they had been searching for twenty years ago, they'd found it tonight. 

Kee glanced around the area and spotted a trail of boot prints and broken branches. They must have detected that she was coming and hurried away without taking care to conceal their tracks. She stepped over the equipment on the ground and followed. 

* * * 

Drik automatically noted the shaking in Pran's hands as he hurriedly calibrated the weapon. The proximity sensor had gone off while they were still at the dig site, now one of the automated traps he'd left had been tripped shortly before they stopped to test the weapon. Pran had every reason to be fearful, after all these years, Drik had slipped up and had been so focused on the uncovering of the artifact that he'd allowed their pursuers to get too close. 

They had only moments to test the weapon before they had to be on the move again. But once he had an opportunity to select an appropriately valuable first target, there would be no need to continue running. 

"I've selected a target." Pran said, working the controls. "Two-meter diameter. Watch that tree up there." He pointed to a wide tree some distance away. 

Drik watched closely as he worked the controls. Pran was far from devious, but he wasn't stupid. Surely, he knew that his usefulness to Drik was coming to an end within mere moments. If their positions were reversed, Drik would not have provided complete instructions to his master for operating the weapon. If Pran had done the same and Drik did away with him prematurely, it could be a fatal setback. But as he watched, he found that Pran followed the exact procedure he'd detailed to Drik years ago when the mechanical component of the weapon had been first completed. 

"Ready." Pran said. 

"Fire." A thrill passed through him, nearly breaking through his carefully composed voice. 

No visible beam emitted from the boxy weapon, no hum or sound of any kind. After a fraction of a second, a spherical aperture opened a subspace rift, enveloping the trunk of the tree. The spherical breach held for a moment, then constricted down to a pinpoint of light and soundlessly disappeared, taking with it the base of the tree and part of the ground under it. With nothing to support it, the remainder of the tree dropped with a deafening sound and toppled over, taking down smaller trees in its path. 

Finally, this was something that left Drik speechless and gaping. 


	18. Chapter 18

A wump that shook the ground followed by snapping branches, then another ground-shaking bang made Kee stop in her tracks. She'd heard trees fall once or twice, but something told her it was no ordinary fallen tree. 

She'd lost the trail in the darkness several minutes ago and decided to head in the direction of the sound. 

* * * 

The tree had been so immense that its fall almost seemed to happen in slow motion. It slipped between its peers that were just as huge and crushed everything smaller in its path. The sound when it hit the ground was so deep that Pran almost felt it more than heard it. And after was complete silence as it echoed through the hills. Moments later, the insects resumed their otherwise incessant calling and the forest returned to what he had come to know as normal. 

"Returning to standby mode." He said before Drik could tell him to. He draped the strap over his shoulder and prepared to stand. As he hoisted the heavy weapon off of the ground, he placed his hand over the signal inversion assembly control chip and slipped if off into his palm. He'd practiced the motion again and again so that it could go unnoticed even under Drik's watchful eye. 

Pran had barely slid the component into his pocket when Drik gripped the strap and lifted it onto his shoulder. With the same movement there was suddenly a phaser jammed into his stomach. 

"Nothing personal." Drik said placidly and a mass of heat blossomed in his stomach. Then came the pain, but his body was too shocked to utter a sound. 

Pran staggered back a step and Drik placed a steady hand on his shoulder. "It's been a truly tedious experience working with you." Then with the most subtle of movements pushed Pran back towards the bluff. With no strength left in his body, he tumbled over backwards and the last thing he knew was his body colliding with the trunk of a tree growing out of the rockface. 

* * * 

The bottom of the fallen tree was like nothing Kee had ever seen. The edge was clean unlike the torn and broken end a natural fallen tree would have. It was perfectly concave, too, as though something had taken a scoop right out of it. She reached out and touched it, perfectly smooth with beads of sap already starting to seep through. 

The tiny hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. 

Someone was watching her. 

But from where? Her heart raced as she searched the trees around her. 

* * * 

From his hiding place, Drik prepared the weapon, following the startup procedure precisely. He chose a diameter large enough to catch his pursuer. He prepared to initiate but hesitated in order to identify the Starfleet individual. When she turned, he saw it was _her._

With no one around, he allowed rage to boil over the surface. What she did to him. What she did to the empire and the Cardassian people. For once in his life, he allowed himself to feel the furry. Relish it. Revel in it, and prepared to send her into nothingness. 

He stopped with his hand over the initiation key. This was too good for her. He needed her to know who it was that was killing her. To know that he shortly would hold the life of her child in his hands and the lives of all of the Alpha Quadrant. He would make her witness to all of it. 

She turned suddenly to look right at him, but she only stared into the dark forest without seeing him. Bajorans had poor night vision compared to Cardassians. 

Without Pran in tow, he again had stealth on his side, but he wasn't sloppy enough to underestimate this Bajoran. If he made the tiniest sound, she would zero in on his location, so he waited patiently for his opportunity. 

Unable to spot him in the darkness, she moved closer to the drop-off. Pran's body had taken plenty of branches and small plants with it on his descent. 

With her distracted, he crept closer to her, just beyond where she could see. He adjusted his phaser to a tight beam and nudged the power down just below the kill level. 

* * * 

Evidently, whoever had fallen down the ledge had survived, Kee decided. There was no body anywhere down there. She couldn't make out any other trail around her, so she glanced along the bluff in each direction, trying to remember where there was a way down when a sudden, burning pain seared through the back of her knee. 

Her leg buckled automatically and she turned to find the source of the pain. She caught a flash of movement in the darkness and a body collided with hers, knocking her to the ground. She tried to turn to grab for her attacker but he was too strong and too fast, he already had her arm twisted behind her back at a harsh angle. 

She clamped down on a scream as he pressed his knee into the fresh wound on her leg with his full weight and he wrapped his free hand around her throat. 

With her face pressed hard into the dirt, she struggled to dislodge him, but for every movement, he responded with more pressure on her leg and a harder twist to her arm. 

Finger by finger, he adjusted his grip around her neck to precisely cut off her air with little pressure. 

She had a feeling she knew who this was and cursed herself for her lack of attention even as her lungs burned for air. She twisted and struggled but he had her so thoroughly pinned that she could do nothing. Pressure built behind her eyes and in her cheeks. She fought until her last shred of strength disappeared into a narrowing shroud of darkness. 


	19. Chapter 19

As it turned out, a shielded vest had been an exceptionally good idea. Pran had been wearing it secretly under his clothes for months now, never sure when Drik would decide his usefulness had run out. Although, the phaser burn on his stomach proved the vest hadn't performed as perfectly as he'd hoped. And the vest had done nothing to protect him from the fall down the bluff. He was sure he had some internal injuries, maybe a broken rib or two. But all of that could be repaired. At least he was alive. 

By the time Pran caught up to Drik, he was carrying an unconscious form on one shoulder and the weapon hanging from the other. On closer inspection, it appeared to be the Bajoran girl who had been the target of Drik's few moments of unguarded loathing. The one who had interfered with their mission to find the artifact in the first place and who had permanently disfigured his face. 

If anything could cause Drik to slip up, it would be his atypical preoccupation with her. Pran just had to maintain his patience long enough for that to happen. 

* * * 

Pain was her first waking thought. 

A throbbing ache behind her eyes prevented her from opening them. She tried to swallow only to find her throat was bruised and swollen. In all the years she'd been in her line of work, she'd woken up with her hands bound enough times to know without having to test them. 

There was nothing but silence around her, but she had to assume that Drik was nearby. He probably already knew she had regained consciousness. 

She finally forced her eyes open and saw in the dim light from only two half-moons that he'd used the polymer rope from her own survival pack to wrap her wrists tight. She twisted them slightly to find it as secure as she'd expected. 

Her body was awkwardly propped against a tree with the stub of an old broken branch jammed in her back. She wedged one heel in the dirt to shift her position and moved to do the same with the other but the attempted movement was met with searing pain in the back of her knee, reminding her that she'd been shot. She bit off a painful whimper but not before part of it escaped her lips. 

More carefully, she managed to push herself upright and turned to see Drik standing with his back to her at the edge of a bluff. A phaser clasped in one hand and the other loosely held onto the first one's wrist. 

Below the bluff lay a wide expanse of rolling hills barely visible in the moonlight. Far away beyond that were the lights from Azea the largest city in Joralla. Her family's home was in one of the towns outlying the city, small enough that the lights weren't discernable from this distance. 

"Lovely view." Drik said without turning. 

"More so now that your people are gone." Her voice was hoarse and just those few words felt like razorblades in her throat. 

He ignored her and continued his musings. "I suppose it's appropriate you're the one who tracked us down. Otherwise I would not be able to share with you the moment when I make an example of that tiny city out there." 

Her eyes snapped back to the cluster of lights while what felt like a black hole opened up in her stomach. It was by far not the most populated city on Bajor but there were almost ten thousand people there. And it was _hers_. Her home. Her family... her daughter. If that tree back there had been a test, he could wipe it out without a trace. 

Drik casually turned while she seethed, making sure she saw the phaser in his hand. Just enough light caught his face for her to see a mangled ocular ridge. The sound of metal striking and crushing the bones on his face came suddenly back to her memory. 

"Oh, but don't worry. Your daughter isn't there." 

She turned away from the city to him, trying to process what he had said. 

"I sent two of my men ahead to collect her." He explained cheerfully as though she hadn't caught on. 

"If you harm her, I swear I will peel every scale from your entire body." She hissed. Despite her words, she felt paralyzed by fear, if he really did have her, Kee would crumble. 

She'd never planned to have a child, never really wanted to be a mother. Her job had been her sole focus and anything else could only distract her from that. 

She'd been completely unprepared for the hold her little girl would have over her. Once that little copy of herself came into her life, she knew nothing and no one could ever be allowed to harm her. She wanted her little girl to know nothing but joy and safety. She'd already failed in that, Iliah had been put in harm's way numerous times. But to be snatched out of her family's home, alone with some terrifying Cardassians. Her heart sank at the thought and she vowed to herself to carry out her threat. 

Seemingly oblivious to her internal unrest, but certainly not really so, he took a few steps away and knelt down next to some piece of equipment, keeping the phaser pointed in her direction. Despite the relaxed position of his hand, she had no doubt he could and would shoot her in a split second if she made a move. 

"This will be but a small demonstration of this weapon's power." He said as he busied himself with the controls. "Would you like to know how it works?" 

"Not really." She said flatly. 

"Good. I'm not sure I can explain it myself." He laughed lightly at his own statement. "I can only assure you that it does. And with it, I can strike back at all of Cardassia's enemies." 

She wouldn't have guessed at revenge being a motivating factor for him, but it was impossible to read what was going on under that mask of a face. No matter his reasons, if he was telling the truth, and she had no reason to believe he wasn't, this would be her last chance to stop him. But her hands were restrained, she was injured and that phaser would stop her long before she reached him. She cursed herself for allowing him to get the jump on her. A lot of people were going to die because of her mistake. 

He gestured with his free hand toward the city like a presenter introducing a piece of art. "You don't want to miss this." 

She didn't turn her focus off of him, this was her last chance. She prepared to lunge forward, but he aimed the phaser squarely at her chest. "Uh uh. This phaser is on full strength. I'd hate for you to miss this, but I won't take any more chances with you." 

She forced herself to back down. If she got herself killed now, there would be no chance to stop him later. She turned for one last look at the city in the distance as he keyed the final sequence. 

But nothing happened. 

Her head whipped around to him. He repeated the command with the same result. For the first time ever, she saw a crack in his façade. A clench in his jaw, a twitch at the corner of his eye that indicated a barely controlled rage within him. 

He searched the interface for the problem with no luck then turned to inspect the hardware, opening panels and checking connections. Finally, he placed his hand on the side of the device and patted around for something that wasn't there. When he removed his hand, she could just barely make out in the darkness where a component had been removed. 

Kee put it together. A missing partner, a trail of broken branches down the drop-off, a missing component and an inoperative device. 

He stood and marched towards her phaser first. He grabbed her wrist and lifted her arms above her head against the tree behind her. Faster than she could have imagined, he had a knife in his hand instead of the phaser. He swung it down toward her. 

She let out an unrestrained scream as the knife pierced through her hand and stuck fast in the tree. Pain shot through her hand down her arm. 

He leaned close calmly. "I can't have you running amok before I return." With that he stalked away into the dark forest. 

She couldn't spare a thought to track what direction he had gone, the pain in her hand demanded her entire attention. The knife was buried deep in the tree and Drik had pulled her hand high enough that she had to lift herself off of the ground to keep from pulling down on it. 

Tears welled in her eyes from the force of the pain with every movement, every twitch of her fingers. 

Gritting her teeth against the pain, she twisted her other hand around to grasp the hilt of the knife and pulled, straining against the urge to cry out again. It didn't budge, so she pulled again. And again. It didn't move a millimeter. Blood trickled down her arm inside her sleeve. 

Snapping branches nearby barely registered to her consciousness until Pran limped out of the forest with dried blood smeared across one side of his face. He barely acknowledged her, instead heading straight for the weapon. He dropped wearily to his knees in front of it and reached into his pocket to produce the missing component. 

Kee renewed her effort to free her hand. 

"I'm surprised he kept you alive." Pran said, unconcerned. Apparently secure in the belief that Drik would have her sufficiently incapacitated. "He's not usually that sentimental." 

While he worked to reset the device, she jerked again on the knife and it finally moved a fraction of a millimeter. Blocking out the pain as best she could, she pushed and pulled the knife up and down until it began wiggling freely. 

She saw him begin the same firing sequence Drik had followed and she knew she was out of time. She yanked the knife free with a painful sound and a gush of blood from her hand. The knife slipped out of her hand and landed somewhere next to her. She forced her knee to bend to get her legs under her and leapt forward. 

Pran only managed to turn halfway toward her before she grasped his collar in her good hand and dragged him to the ground with a heavy impact. She twisted the fabric around her hand to tighten it against his neck ridges. She stood on one leg, intending to drag him away from the weapon when a phaser blast sliced through the darkness, striking him in the side of his head. 

He immediately went limp and she dropped him while she searched for the source of the blast. But the beam had left a bright streak across her vision so all she could see was a dark form approaching her. Even as she blinked her night vision back, she knew it was Drik and hobbled back a few steps on her good leg. 

"I have to say, I didn't think he had it in him to fool me like that." Drik said out of the darkness. Her vision had cleared enough to see that he glanced down at her bloodied hand. "And I didn't expect you to free yourself either. It's not often people surprise me." 

He stepped closer, but not close enough for her to reach him or his phaser. She was close enough to the device that he would have to get within arm's length to use it. He raised up his posture to intimidate her to step away, but she wouldn't budge. 

Why didn't he just shoot her? Was he really so desperate for her to witness his revenge that he wasn't willing to do it? With her injuries, she needed him to get closer before she could make a move, but he was smarter than that. She needed a distraction. 

She turned suddenly toward the device as though something had happened. 

He turned too and she charged forward, but he turned back too soon. Before she could connect her body with his, he swung his phaser up and slammed it across her temple. The force of the blow knocked her off her feet and sent her head spinning. 

Through the haze in her brain, she saw him stand over her with the phaser pointed down at her. "Too much trouble." It sounded like he'd said it from the other end of a long tunnel. "I'll give your daughter your regards." 

Another phaser blast lit up her awareness, but she didn't feel any pain. She sluggishly looked up to see him with his back to her, firing his phaser into the forest. 

One of the other search teams? They shouldn't be anywhere near here. 

She forced her perceptions to focus and pushed herself into a crouch, ignoring the way her knee felt like it would tear itself apart. 

Drik continued exchanging fire with someone in the darkness, not expecting her to recover so quickly. After a fierce return of phaser fire into the darkness, the unseen attacker cried out as Drik landed a hit. 

Seywan. It was Seywan. She'd told him to stay with Girard! 

With the bonds on her wrists still secure, she threw herself at him, shoulder first. As they went down to the ground together, she hooked her arms around his neck and pulled his head backward. 

Sharp pain shot through her side as he jammed his elbow into her ribs repeatedly. In the scuffle, a leaf brushed gently against her cheek leaving a burning sting in its path. A _turi_ nettle. She craned her neck to confirm and hauled him over her to press him face-first into the stinging plant. 

He growled a painful complaint as the stinging barbs delivered their poison into his skin but he kept his wits and pulled her into the plant with him. 

The leaves stung trails across her hands and neck, any exposed skin. 

With the distraction of the nettles, he turned her onto her back and straddled her hips to pin her down with his bodyweight. He held her wrists in place with one hand and grabbed the phaser from where he'd dropped it in the scuffle. 

A phaser blast shot over his head, narrowly missing him. 

Kee took the opportunity to free her hands and grab the phaser. She pulled and shoved the weapon into the ground, twisting her body at the same time to throw him off of her. 

The two struggled for the weapon and superior position, each one urgently pushing the emitter end toward the other. 

The phaser slipped in her bloodied hands and she nearly lost her grip. With one last desperate push, she shoved the phaser against his neck and raked her fingers across the firing key. It discharged with only a short blast, but the weapon had been set to maximum so that's all she needed. 

She held onto him for a few more seconds to be sure he was gone, only now allowing herself to feel the pain of her injured knee and hand again. 

"I'm sorry, I had to use my left hand and couldn't get a clean shot." Seywan said as he appeared out of the trees with a phaser burn on his right arm. 

"Where's Girard?" She demanded. 

"He's stable. We were able to shut down the trip sensors." He said as he cut the rope around her wrists and it slipped off. "Let me take a look at that hand." He began to open his med kit. 

"Just bandage it, there's no time for the dermal regenerator. My family's in danger. We have to make contact with Ralka and Cetha and have them shut down the dampening field." 

He quickly wrapped her hand with a bandage while she slipped the previously missing component off of the weapon. Just in case. 

"Girard's working on boosting the comm signal." 

With her hand wrapped, he hooked her arm around his shoulder and helped her to her feet. "I told you to get Girard back to the others." 

"Actually, you said if I think he can be moved, get him back to the others, otherwise make camp." He said as they limped back the way he had come. 

She couldn't argue his point so she skipped past it. "How'd you find me in the dark?" 

"I actually spotted the other Cardassian. I think you said his name was Pran?" They began to find a rhythm to their faltering walk. "But I lost him a little way away from here. Then I heard you... must have been your hand." 

"Well... thanks." She muttered. Disobeying orders or not, she did appreciate the save. 

They hobbled the rest of the way back to Girard in silence. It was only around two or three kilometers, but between her injury and the terrain, it took quite some time. 

All the while, her thoughts kept circling around the same thought: _Iliah's in danger._

She didn't want to imagine what her little girl must be going through. When she was her age, she remembered how frightening the occasional run-in with Cardassians was. Then when she was not yet a teenager, being snatched away from her family by them, certain she was going to die and terrified of what might happen in the meantime. 

Despite the pain and exhaustion, that was the thought that compelled her to keep moving. 

The faint light from a tricorder up ahead told her they had reached Girard's position. By the smell of it, there had been a small fire earlier in the night but it was gone now. He glanced up to acknowledge them, his neck was still stiff from his own injury and the wide-eyed look he gave her reminded her how she must have appeared. 

"Any luck?" Seywan asked him. 

He wouldn't be able to speak until he'd been treated at a medical facility, but he tilted his hand back and forth to communicate partial success. 

Seywan left her leaning against a tree and knelt down to assist while Kee remained standing on one leg. 

"Looks like we need to boost the power." Seywan began extracting the power source from another tricorder and set to work interconnecting them. 

She should sit down, get off of her feet, allow her body to rest if only for a little bit, but she couldn't bring herself to do so. She wanted to move, to pace, to do _something_ but she could only stand and wait. 

After agonizing moments, Seywan looked up at her. "Try it now." 

Kee tapped her combadge, "Norv to Ralka." 

Silence. But just as she was about to try again, she heard a burst of static. _"Ralka here."_

She closed her eyes with relief. "Are they giving you trouble?" She asked first. 

_"They've... had a few words to express themselves, but it's under control."_

"Good. I need you to shut down the dampening field." 

_"Yes, sir. It will be down in a moment."_

"Continue holding position, I'll have a team beam to your location shortly. Norv out." 

"The dampening field is down." Seywan said. 

She slapped her combadge again harder than necessary. "Norv to Tursa base!" 

_"Tursa base."_

Kee blinked at the welcome sound of her captain's voice and unintentionally addressed her in the familiar. "Trish! I'm so glad to hear your voice! We need to send a security team to my family's residence!" 

_"It's okay, it's taken care of. Iliah's safe."_ Captain Russel said calmly. 

Kee's strength finally gave out and she dropped to her knees suddenly lightheaded. Iliah was safe. A wave of fatigue washed over her and she wanted to just lay down and be done with everything. With effort, she pulled herself back to the task at hand. 

"Lieutenant Ralka and Ensign Cetha are holding eight Cardassians in custody. Beam a security team to their location. Ensign Girard needs immediate medical attention, beam him to the nearest medical facility. Seywan and I need medical assistance as well. I need you to send another team to a location about two kilometers northwest of my present location, there's a weapon and two Cardassians bodies that need to be processed." 

_"I'll have them beam you to the medical facility along with Girard."_

"No, it's just some cuts and phaser burns. Nothing Maggie and Doctor Evans can't treat in the field. I'd rather you beam us back to the weapon's location." 

_"Commander, you know the doctor isn't going to go for that."_

"Please, sir, I need to see this through to the end. This all happened because we were unable to stop them twenty years ago. I was there when it started, I need to be here when it ends." 

After a long pause, Russel responded. _"Alright. I'll get you where you need to go, but you'll have to face Evans yourself."_ She warned. 

"Deal." Kee said, she'd handled her fair share of Evans' lectures over the years, she thought, as Girard began to dematerialize. 


	20. Chapter 20

Maggie passed the dermal regenerator slowly across the palm of Kee's hand. "You're really lucky this wasn't worse." She scolded. 

"I know, Evans already gave me the talk." Her voice still had a noticeable rasp to it. 

Her hand had required minor surgery, which was no small task to perform in the field. But Kee wouldn't budge, and because of her position with Starfleet Intelligence, even their chief medical officer couldn't order her to leave when Federation security was at stake. 

Kee flexed her fingers a few times when Maggie pushed her hair aside to heal the bruises on her face. The phaser burn on the back of her knee, the bruising around her neck, the knife wound to her hand, the bruises circling her wrists all told a familiar story. She'd fought, hard, offering up her body as a sacrifice in exchange for the safety of others. And Maggie was there to make her whole again as she always did. Through shattered ribs, concussions, broken bones and even a coma, she always had been and would always be there for her friend. 

Maggie finally broke the silence. "It must have been difficult to be here." 

Kee turned away from watching the crews gathering evidence from the scene and it took her a moment to process the question. "It has been." She said softly, but Maggie could see in her eyes that that didn't begin to describe it. This place must have been full of ghosts. 

Maggie moved on to the bruises on her wrists, erasing them with each pass of the dermal regenerator and Kee continued. "But it's also reminded me how beautiful it is here. Except for the killing and being hunted, the lack of shelter, clean clothes, food, the cold... I kind of miss it. I should come back here more often." 

"Wow! Does that mean when it's time for your next vacation, you'll go willingly?" 

"I wouldn't go that far." She said playfully. 

Maggie snickered with her. If there was one thing Starfleet medical professionals were good at, it was dealing with officers that refused to take breaks. 

Kee's smile faded and her attention drifted back to the weapon. 

"What are they going to do with it?" 

"The remains of the Nacene will probably be sent to a cold station. Unless they decide to go dark with it. The mechanical component will be disassembled for study at an undisclosed... lab." The last of the sentence drifted off as something caught her eye. Maggie followed her gaze to see that Loren had beamed in. 

Kee rushed over to him and wrapped her arms around him for a long, deep kiss. Far more of a display than the couple usually allowed in public, this whole thing must have had Kee much more out of sorts than she let on. 

As Maggie tried to look like she wasn't watching, Kee hooked her fingers loosely in his and tugged him away from the group. 

* * * 

"Where are we going?" Loren protested as Kee led him farther away from the group to have some privacy. 

In the resistance days, couples often snuck away to take care of private matters and didn't always worry about getting far enough away for full seclusion. But nobody cared, the group just raised their voices a bit louder to cover up the sound of breaking branches and sometimes no-so-muffled vocalizations. 

But this wasn't the resistance days. It wouldn't be appropriate for a pair of senior officers to be caught in such an operation. But after the last few days, there was something she needed that only he could provide. 

After selecting a spot far enough from the activity and visually secluded, she turned him around and shoved him against a sturdy tree. She raised up on her tiptoes and kissed him urgently. The taste of his mouth was both familiar and exciting at the same time. No matter how many thousands of times she felt his lips against hers, it still sent a thrill through her body. 

He responded for a moment before reluctantly pulling back. "What are you doing? We could get caught." 

"Don't worry, I can hear if anybody approaches." She said, nuzzling his ear. Her hands slid up his arms, feeling the defined muscles under his uniform, then up to his shoulders. With her hands resting on his chest, she reached up to kiss him again. The stubble on his face scratched against her lips and chin, but she pressed against him anyway. 

Finally relaxing into it, he slid his hands around her waist and pulled her tight. Despite his obvious discomfort at such a location, his hands began roaming her backside. 

She playfully bit his lip and pushed him hard against the tree, then began to unfasten the layers of his uniform. He sucked in a sharp breath when the damp, cold air touched his skin. But he didn't protest when her equally cold fingers traced the muscular lines down his chest and around his waist. 

He pulled her body tight against his and turned her around so she was pinned against the tree. She let out a tiny yelp upon impact. 

Breathing hard, he dug into her uniform to pull the pieces open and detached the tanktop from her pants. She slipped off her boots while trying to hold onto enough presence of mind to keep listening for anyone happening by. 

* * * 

_Several weeks later._

Kee and Jeff's hurried footsteps fell into sync for a moment as they ran side-by-side toward the extraction point, but soon diverged again because of Kee's shorter gait. They'd been working a lead on the Boslic-Bardeezan smuggling case that Jeff had continued to pursue while Kee had her supposed vacation. One little mistake, a slip of the tongue, and their cover had been blown. 

They were almost to the exit when a couple of thugs, a Reegrunion and a Corvallen, rounded the corner into their paths. Instead of slowing down to avoid them, the two Starfleet agents maintained their speed and slammed into them with their full force. 

The Corvallen had to be twice Kee's weight and she only managed to knock him off balance, but she had learned to take any advantage she could get. She swung her elbow up into the side of his face, driving his head into the wall. 

"Well, you seem more relaxed." Jeff said through the exertion of grappling with his Reegrunion. 

"Hadn't noticed." She ducked to avoid the Corvallen's fist. 

"Did you take my suggestion?" His question was punctuated by an audible exhale as he was slammed into the wall. 

Kee wrapped her arms around her foe's head and pulled down to drive her knee into his neck, then pounded his head into the wall again. "If you must know, I did happen to have marital relations with my husband." She said as the Corvallen slumped against the wall and she turned to Jeff, still struggling, with her hands on her hips. "But it had _nothing_ to do with your suggestion." 

The Reegrunion landed at her feet in a heap. "In any case it worked, so I was right." He breathed hard. 

She blew out a snort and socked him in the bicep before taking off toward their extraction point again. 

"Ow." He said, laughing and catching up to her. 

They stopped at an unmarked point in the hallway where the facility's shields had a weak point and he tapped the hidden communicator behind his ear twice to call for beam out. 

"I hear you had an interesting time, though." He said just before the transporter beam took hold of them. Of course, he would have heard all about her adventure with Drik and Pran. No matter what he was working on, he always had his ear to the ground. 


End file.
